6 ms·

It's so frustrating to me that this is all based around the stupid legal assumption that we have to stream everything. God forbid your user should download som

It's so frustrating to me that this is all based around the stupid legal assumption that we have to stream everything. God forbid your user should download something to watch later, to prevent having to redownload every time you watch it. And then during peak Netflix hours, I just can't use the internet reliably. If anyone knows any source for Libre video works, that I can download and watch with complete freedom, please let me know. I'd pay for it.

lotu 13y ago
Honestly the assumption that we want to stream everything is a really good assumption. People are lazy and setting up a proper storage is tricky and costs money. This means 99.9% of people don't want to do it. Yes being in the .1% it would be nice if we were catered to but that's life.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  In my experience people seem to be able to use TiVos just fine.
  - nfoz 13y ago
    People could use Napster just fine, too.
  - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
    The DVR model is really the way to do it. People know what they want to watch, so you present a catalog of all existing and future content and let people check the box next to the ones they want to watch. Everything downloads during off-peak hours as soon as the content is available and then you always have a list of things you can watch instantly, even if the internet is slow or unavailable.
    - digikata 13y ago
      The DVR model was strangled by the same content owners & distributors that are moving to kill competitive last-mile internet access. How many cable companies rolled their own crappy set-top DVR boxes instead of working with Tivo or some other independent DVR maker.
  - pjlegato 13y ago
    Tivo's annual revenue is 406m, and the company is worth 1.45bn. (https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ATIVO https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ATIVO) Respectable? Sure. But not even close to Netflix. Netflix's annual revenue is 4.3 BN (i.e. over 10x higher), and the company is worth 21bn. (https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ANFLX https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ANFLX) Why? Sure, a relatively few people will use Tivo, but many more won't. Empirically, the convenience / lack of planning necessary to watch streaming video is worth approximately 10x more. This illustrates the importance of using data rather than anecdotes to draw conclusions. As a HN poster, our personal experience tends to be heavily biased towards our self-selected associations with more technically oriented people rather than "normal," average people.
    - whoopdedo 13y ago
      The problem with Tivo is their growth was cut-off when the service providers started selling their own DVRs. Who's going to buy an extra Tivo box when your cable or satellite company sells you an all-in-one box with the ability to record multiple channels at once? I expect the number of people who use DVRs is close to that of premium television subscribers. People who don't are cord-cutters or only receive a low-cost basic package.
    - digikata 13y ago
      Netflix could easily deploy on a DVR machine which could pre-buffer watch list or recommended video. There's nothing wrong with DVR technology. I suspect limitations really stem from the legal licensing distinctions between distributing video streaming vs buffer & watch-later.
    - sroerick 13y ago
      Tivo is a massively outdated business model. It's still relient on a time schedule run by TV networks. I'm looking for the modern equivalent of TiVo, something that lets me save and keep the content I'm streaming. Parent was not using an anecdote to illustrate that streaming is better/worse than downloading. Parent was using an anecdote to prove the fact that UIs exist that allow people to store media, rather than constantly streaming it.
- unclebucknasty 13y ago
  >Honestly the assumption that we want to stream everything is a really good assumption. It's really more for the providers and cintent owners: keeps customers tethered and paying for the privilege of suckling from server teats whenever they consume content. Because, really, storage could be made just as easy for consumers as streaming if providers had the will. Instead, it's "put everything in the cloud, then pay us over and over again to access it".
- betterunix 13y ago
  That is why distributed storage would be so much better. You know, if 10 people download a movie, I should be able to download it from any of those 10 people. Or all of them could send me part of the file, improving throughput. Oh, wait, we already have that technology. Too bad we have people who have worked for twenty years to kill it.
  - sroerick 13y ago
    People espouse the benefits of FLOSS all the time, but I don't understand why no one cares about libre content. I want to watch videos that I can do whatever I want with. I don't give a damn about NBC shows.
- sroerick 13y ago
  How about smart caching? Why can't netflix automatically preload 3 episodes ahead in a show that you're watching? Consumers might not want to have to deal with HDD storage, but I would bet you dollars to donuts that they want 4K without buffering issues. EDIT: Also, I just wanted to mention that maybe our companies should be inventing new ways of storing things (like TiVo did with remarkable success), instead of spending all of their resources aquiring the rights to hit movies and extorting each other.
- sroerick 13y ago
  That's fine. Make a tiny download link at the bottom of the page. It would require little to no infrastructure changes. Let the 99% stream.
admax88q 13y ago
What's worse, is that if the ISP had implemented multicast for real, then we could save enormous amounts of bandwidth. Think of the wasted traffic has thousands of people watch a live stream in unison. Or the millions watching viral youtube videos only a few seconds apart.
higherpurpose 13y ago
If you had a 100 Mbps connection, like many other countries do, streaming Netflix in HD would not be a problem. So this is first and foremost a lazy monopolist problem, less so a congestion problem.
- Selfcommit 13y ago
  I have a 100mbps connection.. I live in NJ. It costs me $80 a month (Which is robbery IMO). But still, I have it.
  - sjtrny 13y ago
    Here in Australia with the most mainstream ISP it costs $90/month for 200GB and a theoretical max speed of 24 Mbits/s via ADSL2 (I only get 10). By global standards you are not being robbed.
    - throwaway2048 13y ago
      I down voted you, allow me to explain why. I personally find this style of "at least its not as bad as somewhere else" argument really infuriating. Because it attempts to shift the argument from "How can we do better? to "Be thankful its not worse!" Its defeatist at best, and actively promotes/degrades the status quo at worst. You aren't making an insightful or interesting post by doing this, you are simply being dismissive and shutting down discussion.
      - sjtrny 13y ago
        I'm not making an argument. I'm just providing another perspective. I entirely agree that both situations need improving.
    - vxNsr 13y ago
      throwaway2048 really hit the crux of the argument but let me be a little more specific: you too are being robbed. And I understand that Australia is a HUGE country with a tiny population/sqmi so at least for the next few years they kinda have to "steal" from you to make it profitable in the long run (same thing happened/is happening with our wireless services here) but still it's not really a fair rate to charge you and you should be always lobbying for less.
noobermin 13y ago
Well, this is not quite equivalent, but consider mobile platforms. Streaming makes much more sense there given the tighter storage constraints.
- davmre 13y ago
  Shouldn't it be exactly the opposite? Mobile is hugely bandwidth-limited, but you can get a 128GB SD card for ~$75 these days. The real reason for streaming is that most people don't know in advance what they want to watch, and with TV/movies, generally only watch something once.
  - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
    > The real reason for streaming is that most people don't know in advance what they want to watch, and with TV/movies, generally only watch something once. I don't know if this is really true. How do you find out about something you want to watch? You see a commercial for it, or somebody tells you about it, etc. If all you had to do was pull your phone out of your pocket and click a button that says "download this when it becomes available" and then be presented with a list of such stuff the next time you want to watch something, you would pretty easily end up with more stuff to watch than time to watch it.
    - marshray 13y ago
      I don't watch much at all, but it's pretty rare that I plan ahead to watch it.
    - tomwrenn 13y ago
      Which is why I'm confused why you guys are advocating this form of consumption over streaming? Assuming most people watch a piece of content once wouldn't it be more bandwidth efficient to transfer them the data on demand when you know they're going to watch it instead of them speculatively guessing what they want to watch and maybe not watching it?
      - 13y ago
gfodor 13y ago
People don't like waiting for downloads, news at 11
- mfisher87 13y ago
  Streaming is downloading. Your computer couldn't play it if it wasn't on your computer. The argument worth making here is that content on Netflix is generally watched once, or rarely. It would be trivial to not delete streamed data if that was a good solution to a problem.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    Streaming is waiting until the point of consumption to download. Buffering entire movies/shows would make a lot of use cases viable that currently aren't.
  - gfodor 13y ago
    "Streaming is downloading" What was the point of this? Is your reading comprehension so poor that you didn't understand "download" to mean "download in full before playback" in this context? Or are you just trying to score pedant points?
    - mfisher87 12y ago
      Ten days later, but the point to this was that if there was demand for keeping the full copy of "Half Baked" that I felt like watching once last year on my hard drive, implementing that sort of feature would be a DRM problem, not a "waiting for downloads" problem. If you can stream the show once, you can keep it on your hard drive without downloading any additional data. There is no "waiting for downloads" necessary. Nice personal attacks though. I was only responding to what you wrote, which contributed nothing to the conversation btw. So that was probably a dumb idea on my part.
  - sroerick 13y ago
    What about bandwidth issues? I'd like to preload a film in 4K so that I could watch it without interruption. And lets not forget that Netflix's whole business model is binge watching, which means you could easily preload future episodes of House of Cards.
ChrisLTD 13y ago
Another wrinkle: The popular devices for viewing online video, Rokus, Apple TVs, gaming consoles, tablets, and phones have little to no storage space for meaningful amounts of HD video.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  The answer to this is to have a DVR attached to the network which takes care of the storage and then stream to all the other devices anywhere in the building.
- sroerick 13y ago
  If the above assumption I mentioned wasn't true, I would imagine all these devices would have USB ports.
mempko 13y ago
Internet archive has a shit ton of movies and videos that are public domain. You can also always Torrent.....
- knodi123 13y ago
  Sure, you can torrent, for now. Until it costs extra to buy the torrenting package from your ISP, and it would be cheaper to just pay for the content.
- sroerick 13y ago
  Internet Archive is great. I'd like access to current creative commons works,though, not just public domain items. I'm trying to fight the copyright regieme, which prevents me from accessing the culture around me. Going back in time to the 40s doesn't exactly do that for me. Don't get me wrong, IA is amazing, and I use it all the time. But I'd like something like Netflix that was exclusively for CC works. vodo seems like a good contender.
AlexLord 13y ago
Streaming is seen, by many content creators, as a way to fight piracy.
- falsecelaona 13y ago
  Steam streaming games is seen, by many content creators, as a way to fight piracy. Streaming (as a means of protection) is as useless as DRM except they're too stupid to not do that dance for their legal departments. It hurts legal consumers and doesn't punish non-legit consumers. It prevents you from using content you've paid for & used previously when your internet goes down. Not to mention the enormous waste of electricity/bandwidth/environment/people's lifespan. It costs us all.
  - AlexLord 13y ago
    I never said it was an effective strategy. I just said that it is seen as a means of fighting piracy. People go to large extremes to protect themselves from a perceived loss, even if their actions are more harmful in the long term.
- sroerick 13y ago
  I know. I'm just frustrated by that. We're imposing random and artificial limits on technology because of an outdated business model. Imagine if the RIAA made a law that CDs could only be played sequentially, and you had to turn the disc over to get to the second half.
webmaven 13y ago
Here you go: http://vodo.net http://vodo.net https://archive.org/details/movies https://archive.org/details/movies http://www.publicdomaintorrents.info http://www.publicdomaintorrents.info
- sroerick 13y ago
  Oh, man. Thank you so much.
- sroerick 13y ago
  Hey do you know any more about Vodo? I can't quite figure out what their bundles are. Are the movies and music and games in the bundle CC? I see the Free Movies page but I'm unsure what the licensing terms for the bundle are.
  - webmaven 13y ago
    I am mostly familiar with the original content they have like the show 'Pioneer 1'. I haven't ever tried their bundles. Since they redesigned their site, it is very difficult to figure out what stuff they have released in the past, but Wikipedia and the Internet Archive can help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VODO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VODO https://web.archive.org/web/20130129195347/http://vodo.net/film/allfilms/downloads https://web.archive.org/web/20130129195347/http://vodo.net/f...

lotu 13y ago

Honestly the assumption that we want to stream everything is a really good assumption. People are lazy and setting up a proper storage is tricky and costs money. This means 99.9% of people don't want to do it. Yes being in the .1% it would be nice if we were catered to but that's life.

pessimizer 13y ago
In my experience people seem to be able to use TiVos just fine.
- nfoz 13y ago
  People could use Napster just fine, too.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  The DVR model is really the way to do it. People know what they want to watch, so you present a catalog of all existing and future content and let people check the box next to the ones they want to watch. Everything downloads during off-peak hours as soon as the content is available and then you always have a list of things you can watch instantly, even if the internet is slow or unavailable.
  - digikata 13y ago
    The DVR model was strangled by the same content owners & distributors that are moving to kill competitive last-mile internet access. How many cable companies rolled their own crappy set-top DVR boxes instead of working with Tivo or some other independent DVR maker.
- pjlegato 13y ago
  Tivo's annual revenue is 406m, and the company is worth 1.45bn. (https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ATIVO https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ATIVO) Respectable? Sure. But not even close to Netflix. Netflix's annual revenue is 4.3 BN (i.e. over 10x higher), and the company is worth 21bn. (https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ANFLX https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ANFLX) Why? Sure, a relatively few people will use Tivo, but many more won't. Empirically, the convenience / lack of planning necessary to watch streaming video is worth approximately 10x more. This illustrates the importance of using data rather than anecdotes to draw conclusions. As a HN poster, our personal experience tends to be heavily biased towards our self-selected associations with more technically oriented people rather than "normal," average people.
  - whoopdedo 13y ago
    The problem with Tivo is their growth was cut-off when the service providers started selling their own DVRs. Who's going to buy an extra Tivo box when your cable or satellite company sells you an all-in-one box with the ability to record multiple channels at once? I expect the number of people who use DVRs is close to that of premium television subscribers. People who don't are cord-cutters or only receive a low-cost basic package.
  - digikata 13y ago
    Netflix could easily deploy on a DVR machine which could pre-buffer watch list or recommended video. There's nothing wrong with DVR technology. I suspect limitations really stem from the legal licensing distinctions between distributing video streaming vs buffer & watch-later.
  - sroerick 13y ago
    Tivo is a massively outdated business model. It's still relient on a time schedule run by TV networks. I'm looking for the modern equivalent of TiVo, something that lets me save and keep the content I'm streaming. Parent was not using an anecdote to illustrate that streaming is better/worse than downloading. Parent was using an anecdote to prove the fact that UIs exist that allow people to store media, rather than constantly streaming it.
unclebucknasty 13y ago
>Honestly the assumption that we want to stream everything is a really good assumption. It's really more for the providers and cintent owners: keeps customers tethered and paying for the privilege of suckling from server teats whenever they consume content. Because, really, storage could be made just as easy for consumers as streaming if providers had the will. Instead, it's "put everything in the cloud, then pay us over and over again to access it".
betterunix 13y ago
That is why distributed storage would be so much better. You know, if 10 people download a movie, I should be able to download it from any of those 10 people. Or all of them could send me part of the file, improving throughput. Oh, wait, we already have that technology. Too bad we have people who have worked for twenty years to kill it.
- sroerick 13y ago
  People espouse the benefits of FLOSS all the time, but I don't understand why no one cares about libre content. I want to watch videos that I can do whatever I want with. I don't give a damn about NBC shows.
sroerick 13y ago
How about smart caching? Why can't netflix automatically preload 3 episodes ahead in a show that you're watching? Consumers might not want to have to deal with HDD storage, but I would bet you dollars to donuts that they want 4K without buffering issues. EDIT: Also, I just wanted to mention that maybe our companies should be inventing new ways of storing things (like TiVo did with remarkable success), instead of spending all of their resources aquiring the rights to hit movies and extorting each other.
sroerick 13y ago
That's fine. Make a tiny download link at the bottom of the page. It would require little to no infrastructure changes. Let the 99% stream.

admax88q 13y ago

What's worse, is that if the ISP had implemented multicast for real, then we could save enormous amounts of bandwidth. Think of the wasted traffic has thousands of people watch a live stream in unison. Or the millions watching viral youtube videos only a few seconds apart.

higherpurpose 13y ago

If you had a 100 Mbps connection, like many other countries do, streaming Netflix in HD would not be a problem. So this is first and foremost a lazy monopolist problem, less so a congestion problem.

Selfcommit 13y ago
I have a 100mbps connection.. I live in NJ. It costs me $80 a month (Which is robbery IMO). But still, I have it.
- sjtrny 13y ago
  Here in Australia with the most mainstream ISP it costs $90/month for 200GB and a theoretical max speed of 24 Mbits/s via ADSL2 (I only get 10). By global standards you are not being robbed.
  - throwaway2048 13y ago
    I down voted you, allow me to explain why. I personally find this style of "at least its not as bad as somewhere else" argument really infuriating. Because it attempts to shift the argument from "How can we do better? to "Be thankful its not worse!" Its defeatist at best, and actively promotes/degrades the status quo at worst. You aren't making an insightful or interesting post by doing this, you are simply being dismissive and shutting down discussion.
    - sjtrny 13y ago
      I'm not making an argument. I'm just providing another perspective. I entirely agree that both situations need improving.
  - vxNsr 13y ago
    throwaway2048 really hit the crux of the argument but let me be a little more specific: you too are being robbed. And I understand that Australia is a HUGE country with a tiny population/sqmi so at least for the next few years they kinda have to "steal" from you to make it profitable in the long run (same thing happened/is happening with our wireless services here) but still it's not really a fair rate to charge you and you should be always lobbying for less.

noobermin 13y ago

Well, this is not quite equivalent, but consider mobile platforms. Streaming makes much more sense there given the tighter storage constraints.

davmre 13y ago
Shouldn't it be exactly the opposite? Mobile is hugely bandwidth-limited, but you can get a 128GB SD card for ~$75 these days. The real reason for streaming is that most people don't know in advance what they want to watch, and with TV/movies, generally only watch something once.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  > The real reason for streaming is that most people don't know in advance what they want to watch, and with TV/movies, generally only watch something once. I don't know if this is really true. How do you find out about something you want to watch? You see a commercial for it, or somebody tells you about it, etc. If all you had to do was pull your phone out of your pocket and click a button that says "download this when it becomes available" and then be presented with a list of such stuff the next time you want to watch something, you would pretty easily end up with more stuff to watch than time to watch it.
  - marshray 13y ago
    I don't watch much at all, but it's pretty rare that I plan ahead to watch it.
  - tomwrenn 13y ago
    Which is why I'm confused why you guys are advocating this form of consumption over streaming? Assuming most people watch a piece of content once wouldn't it be more bandwidth efficient to transfer them the data on demand when you know they're going to watch it instead of them speculatively guessing what they want to watch and maybe not watching it?
    - 13y ago

gfodor 13y ago

People don't like waiting for downloads, news at 11

mfisher87 13y ago
Streaming is downloading. Your computer couldn't play it if it wasn't on your computer. The argument worth making here is that content on Netflix is generally watched once, or rarely. It would be trivial to not delete streamed data if that was a good solution to a problem.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  Streaming is waiting until the point of consumption to download. Buffering entire movies/shows would make a lot of use cases viable that currently aren't.
- gfodor 13y ago
  "Streaming is downloading" What was the point of this? Is your reading comprehension so poor that you didn't understand "download" to mean "download in full before playback" in this context? Or are you just trying to score pedant points?
  - mfisher87 12y ago
    Ten days later, but the point to this was that if there was demand for keeping the full copy of "Half Baked" that I felt like watching once last year on my hard drive, implementing that sort of feature would be a DRM problem, not a "waiting for downloads" problem. If you can stream the show once, you can keep it on your hard drive without downloading any additional data. There is no "waiting for downloads" necessary. Nice personal attacks though. I was only responding to what you wrote, which contributed nothing to the conversation btw. So that was probably a dumb idea on my part.
- sroerick 13y ago
  What about bandwidth issues? I'd like to preload a film in 4K so that I could watch it without interruption. And lets not forget that Netflix's whole business model is binge watching, which means you could easily preload future episodes of House of Cards.

ChrisLTD 13y ago

Another wrinkle: The popular devices for viewing online video, Rokus, Apple TVs, gaming consoles, tablets, and phones have little to no storage space for meaningful amounts of HD video.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
The answer to this is to have a DVR attached to the network which takes care of the storage and then stream to all the other devices anywhere in the building.
sroerick 13y ago
If the above assumption I mentioned wasn't true, I would imagine all these devices would have USB ports.

mempko 13y ago

Internet archive has a shit ton of movies and videos that are public domain. You can also always Torrent.....

knodi123 13y ago
Sure, you can torrent, for now. Until it costs extra to buy the torrenting package from your ISP, and it would be cheaper to just pay for the content.
sroerick 13y ago
Internet Archive is great. I'd like access to current creative commons works,though, not just public domain items. I'm trying to fight the copyright regieme, which prevents me from accessing the culture around me. Going back in time to the 40s doesn't exactly do that for me. Don't get me wrong, IA is amazing, and I use it all the time. But I'd like something like Netflix that was exclusively for CC works. vodo seems like a good contender.

AlexLord 13y ago

Streaming is seen, by many content creators, as a way to fight piracy.

falsecelaona 13y ago
Steam streaming games is seen, by many content creators, as a way to fight piracy. Streaming (as a means of protection) is as useless as DRM except they're too stupid to not do that dance for their legal departments. It hurts legal consumers and doesn't punish non-legit consumers. It prevents you from using content you've paid for & used previously when your internet goes down. Not to mention the enormous waste of electricity/bandwidth/environment/people's lifespan. It costs us all.
- AlexLord 13y ago
  I never said it was an effective strategy. I just said that it is seen as a means of fighting piracy. People go to large extremes to protect themselves from a perceived loss, even if their actions are more harmful in the long term.
sroerick 13y ago
I know. I'm just frustrated by that. We're imposing random and artificial limits on technology because of an outdated business model. Imagine if the RIAA made a law that CDs could only be played sequentially, and you had to turn the disc over to get to the second half.

webmaven 13y ago

Here you go: http://vodo.net http://vodo.net https://archive.org/details/movies https://archive.org/details/movies http://www.publicdomaintorrents.info http://www.publicdomaintorrents.info

sroerick 13y ago
Oh, man. Thank you so much.
sroerick 13y ago
Hey do you know any more about Vodo? I can't quite figure out what their bundles are. Are the movies and music and games in the bundle CC? I see the Free Movies page but I'm unsure what the licensing terms for the bundle are.
- webmaven 13y ago
  I am mostly familiar with the original content they have like the show 'Pioneer 1'. I haven't ever tried their bundles. Since they redesigned their site, it is very difficult to figure out what stuff they have released in the past, but Wikipedia and the Internet Archive can help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VODO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VODO https://web.archive.org/web/20130129195347/http://vodo.net/film/allfilms/downloads https://web.archive.org/web/20130129195347/http://vodo.net/f...