Hacker News Reader

Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

They are following in the footsteps of the movie industry, which also provides worse experience to the paying customer.

Pay for movie theater ticket, get served 30+ minutes of ads. (edit) Pay for DVD, get unskippable "antipiracy ads". Torrent the movie, and you'll be watching the movie in under 3 minutes of download.

View on HN

That's also if they provide any experience at all. You know, "not available in your region" is what a paying non-US non-EU customer should expect to occasionally see. Worse: even if there was something in "your" library last week, you can't expect it to be there tomorrow.

If you're non-paying customer, with some services, you may get around with a VPN. If you're paying for the service - virtually everyone uses your billing address, so you're paying to have access denied.

Just had that experience with GPM recently (other services are no better)

> Pay for movie theater ticket, get served 30+ minutes of ads.

In Thailand, there is (was?) a 5-minute-long (literally) memorial video dedicated to King Rama IX before every movie. Everyone in the theatre is expected to stand for the video's entirety - after the 30 minutes of ads and trailers.

I like the memorial video and don't mind standing for it at all. Altough it would be a nice touch if they put subtitles on it.

Chiming in real quick. Why the downvote HN? Let a guy have his preferences (:

I don't know for sure why the downvote, but maybe because Thailand is a place where you can be imprisoned or exiled for criticizing the (late) king. It's not hard to imagine somebody on HN might not be cool with somebody supporting that sort of enforced devotion.

Just to clarify, you can also be imprisoned for criticizing the current King, as well as any of the late Kings at all.

The user is being downvoted because he brought up an unrelated argument that contributes little to the discussion. The original complaint was being forced to stand up and pay respects to the late king. Not whether people liked/disliked the memorial.

It's akin to a debate about whether Apple was right to push copies of U2's albums onto all iTunes users [0], and someone chiming in with, "But I don't mind U2!"

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/oct/15/u2-bono-issues...

They keep trying to make it more like TV. Seemingly oblivious to the generation using it exclusively because it's not TV.

I guess giant TV advertising budgets are sticky and they're trying to figure out how to shift them to YouTube?

Not just that--quality too. Enjoying your 4K computer screen? And you're paying for the highest-tier Netflix subscription to get 4K content? Well, unless you're using Microsoft Edge, you're capped at 720.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444

Theres a chrome extension to get netflix to stream at 4k. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/super-netflix/aioe...

> Pay for movie theater ticket, get served 30+ minutes of ads.

Man, you aren’t kidding. I’m a spoiled Seattleite who can walk to two IMAX theaters attached to a non-profit science center, Paul Allen’s Cinerama, and an indie theater. I had the experience of going to a big name multiplex theater in another city recently, and I just had to shake my head at how awful the experience was for how much it cost.

Almost instantly nowadays, because there are streaming torrent programs.

I wouldn't call an IMAX setup a 'subpar experience'

These days, when I have a movie ticket for time T, I plan to arrive at T+20 minutes. That's when the ads are over, roughly when the trailers are playing.

It doesn't work well if the ticket has no reserved seat. You do that and the only seat available will be in the first row.

Dont think thats really a thing outside of US (another thing the US is like awkwardly behind in).

Assigned seating is gaining traction pretty quickly here. The theaters with good reputations all assign seats.

There are several "dining" theatres near me including one which only has full service prior to the films beginning, and all of them are low-occupancy theatres with online seat selection and generally very large, comfortable, sometimes rolling leather chairs.

Pick your ticket online, show up a few minutes earlier, enjoy a decent appetizer, and get a drink or two while the movie is on. Whatever floats your boat. I find it's a much better experience and frankly not that much more expensive than sitting through hell my local multiplex

I’ve one of these locally as well. We used to like it until we went 3 times in a row to see a specific movie and were told that the online schedule was incorrect. What a waste of time.

That's nice, in my country we have two big movie theater companies who provide a similar service, but I hate it because they serve the food in the beginning of the movie, so there's a lot of noice and waiters coming and going.

Our local theater finally figured out the right way to do this. Only the rear half of the theater can order food at their seats. If you're in the front half, you have to get your food in the lobby and bring it in yourself.

This way, when you make your seat selection, you can choose if you want the convenience and slight distraction of waiters, or if you just want the comfy chair and no waiter.

Depends on the Cinema I guess. At least most cinemas I’ve worked with have configured their system to adjust show start depending on how much advertisement there is so the ads are finished ca 10-15 minutes after the scheduled time.

Well, when the movie is in theather, there are rarely good quality (non-cam) torrents available and the screen is usually bigger than at home, but it might not be a factor, depending on the viewer or the movie. But it's true when it reach DVD, you'll still have to watch the anti-piracy ads.

Interestingly Netflix et al skip the anti-piracy garbage and excluding the miserable UI actually do a good job of making "pick movie -> watch movie" as convenient as torrenting.

But still, I've torrented every DvD I own and the discs rot in the attic. I never cared about the extras anyway time to watch is ~a hundred times lower.

This might be different in the German 'market' but it rarely takes more than a few weeks to have a high quality copy of the cinema movie around.

There are at least 2 sites that have a way better selection than any video store, amazon or Netflix ever will have.

Except that some hosts force you to watch an ad (30 secs) it is literally the most comfortable way to consume anything.

If your client has a sequential downloading option and it's a healthy torrent with just the movie/show (i.e. not a split RAR file), you can effectively stream the movie/show.

Not to mention the increase of product placement in movies these days too!

Ive been paying 1-2$ for a movie on amazon or whatever. Non issue

I love the movie theater and the previews.

I liked previews more when they didn't spoil the entire movie. Movie theaters are okay for louder movies. I regret watching a quiet place in a theater. The loud audience did their best to ruin the experience.

Some theaters charge a little more and have a one-warning policy before ejecting customers for talking or using cellphones. I watched A Quiet Place in such a theater and thoroughly enjoyed the experience - the high-quality surround sound was great for a movie that relies so much on sound design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com