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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons I don't buy any online versions of movies from Amazon anymore is because of their UI (the other reason is that I just don't trust them). Their web UI for videos lets me scroll through cumbersome graphical tiles of my movies in A-Z, Z-A, or oldest-newest -- that's all. On the firestick, I can't search them except via Alexa, which tries to sell me a different copy of the same movie, or to sell me other movies. I can scroll only in order of newest-oldest purchase order. The more titles I have, the worse the experience is.

Fuck 'em and their dark patterns. I'm happier going old-school and buying blue-rays from the criterion collection.

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My Prime Video experience on Apple TV in the UK mirrors this. I knew exactly what I wanted to watch but I simply could not figure out how to get the app to show it to me. The search feature returned and endless feed of results, none of which matched.

Let's take a live example tested while writing this comment. I searched for "Stand-up comedy", and I see 9 results on my TV right now:

- The Grand Tour

- The Grand Tour presents: Lochdown

- The Grand Tour (again? must be a different season?)

- The Grand Tour (yes, again)

- The Tomorrow War

- The Office

- The Office (again)

And just for fun, let's list the next 9:

- The Office (again)

- Borat 2

- South Park

- South Park (again)

It's baffling to me that table-stakes features like this can be completely neglected for a product which is obviously a massive capital investment. I do think I understand now why it is that my friend with Prime Video watches The Office almost all of the time...

Edit: Apparently searching for "stand-up comedy live" or simply "comedy live" does show the type of content the search implies. I'd be keen to have someone explain what non-live stand-up comedy looks like to justify the difference in interpretation. Perhaps they could also tell me about how "stand-up" carries zero usable information...

The ranking is probably influenced by the cost to Amazon and likelihood that you get hooked.

Not so sure. I accidentally forgot to unsubscribe from the Prime emails way back, so once a week I get an email recommending shows I've already seen. Such as TGT, South Park, the individual presenters from TGT and so on. Oh, and they're also kind enough to remind me about their app...which is the one I'm already using to see their shows...

I'm leaning more towards laziness and lack of creativity.

I can't watch The Office. Too much like the real office.

Amazon search has always been terrible. It’s very frustrating.

About as useful as Amazon search, Kindle giant list o' books interface, Amazon Prime Video on Android TV gizmos etc.

Could always just watch The Grand Tour on repeat. That's what I do

Just another point of data to help comments reader avoid selection bias: If I search "Stand up comedy" on prime video I get

- Butch Bradley: From Las Vegas

- Melinda Hill: Inappropriate

- Steve Treviño: My Life In Quarantine

- Jimmy O. Yang: Good Deal

- Jim Gaffigan: The Pale Tourist

- Michael Gelbart: All New Smash Hits

- Sebastian LIVE

- Tom Segura: Completely Normal

and so on.

Heh. I am so sick of all the movie apps and how hard it is to find which one has what, plus the fact that they all only have American superhero movies, that I started renting discs again.

Turns out there's someone in my country that rents movies via snail mail. I suspect it's just someone with a very large collection trying to recoup some of the money spent on it. It works really well.

I love it -- the fellow countryman picked up, dusted off, and re-used the good business model that Netflix discarded so long ago. It's great.

FYI you can still get discs from Netflix if you want them; they just don't make it very easy to find. Go to dvd.com

Hmm, they didn't discard it so much as bury it alive[1], though?

1: https://dvd.netflix.com/

In my relatively recent experience they are letting it die just by not replacing content that they once had. That said, I am probably underestimating how difficult it is to find replacements.

God this is every media app, try organizing your e-books in a pleasing fashion someday. You just can’t.

This is what you get when every App has to invent the File System all over again.

My kingdom for a widely-supported cross-platform standard for file metadata and tagging.

How large is it, and does it come with any good-looking princesses?

I'd tell you, but I was keeping all that info in extended attributes and lost it all when I switched filesystems.

It's even worse when media apps are coupled with a store and the cloud. I'm using Apple's iBooks/Books.app as an ePub reader on Mac OS. Searching the library always lands you in the Store portion of the app. The app always forgets the sorting order of the library. And 90 % of the time my epubs are not on the device but uploaded into iCloud; even the placeholder entry is missing its thumbnails. The best way to use Books.app as an ePub reader is to store the books in the file system and delete them from Books.app after reading. But because Books.app is there and free there aren't quality alternative ePub reader for Mac OS anymore.

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