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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

>It's obviously not an easy problem to solve

It probably is at least relatively. The problem is that you (or at least a lot of people) wouldn't like the answer. Make it a very curated marketplace. Yes, that would take some labor but you can also take into account ratings etc. (Though not sure how to deal with the legit crappy online banking app that people give low-ratings too.)

But cue the outrage over my app dropped below a 4.0 rating and Apple kicked me out of the App Store. Or Apple decided I wasn't popular enough. Or any of the other ways in which curation produces losers that will be at least somewhat arbitrary at the margins.

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You have two tabs: curated, and what's popular.

Across all of the apps that I use to consume content, I only know one app that does this well: Criterion. Here, look:

https://www.criterionchannel.com/browse

First thing to note. You can browse w/o having to create an account!

You know what else Criterion does? Rather, what it doesn't do? It doesn't cut off the end of movies at the credits to spam me with what it thinks I want to watch next. There's no "you may like this other thing" based on my watch history. Rather, content is grouped already based on attributes of the movies, not based on my watch history.

Criterion cares about movies and about me as a movie watcher, and it shows.

I will pay Criterion $99/year till the end of time.

The only thing I'd like them to improve is their streaming quality a bit. The video stream is okay, but none of the soundtracks are anything but stereo at best, even for movies they also sell as Blu-ray that have multi-channel DTS soundtracks.

Criterion's app is nice but their movie selection is ... not great. I've watched a good portion of their films and less than half have turned out to be worth watching.

But this is no surprise. Per this quora answer by Larry Wright ( https://qr.ae/pvlbgP ) -

> Note that Criterion is a video distribution company. One may still wonder exactly whom makes the selections and with what credentials. Co-founder Robert Stein's background is in electronic publishing. Co-founders Joe Medjuck and Roger Smith produced such Criterion-unworthy fair as "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!" and "C.C. and Company" (respectively). One must assume that they employ a crack team of film historians, critics and assorted movie geeks to curate their titles.

Criterion has definitely been historically film classic/art house oriented. Which, even as a generally film buff, doesn't necessarily line up with what I want and definitely may not line up with a Saturday evening when I just want to relax.

Different strokes for different folks. I watch a lot of old films. My letterboxd watchlist currently contains 365 films which can be streamed thusly:

69 are available on Criterion. 61 are on HBO. 22 are on Amazon Prime. 17 are on Netflix. 15 are on Hulu. 6 are on Disney+.

240 are available as rentals on on iTunes.

(And I have no idea who Larry Wright is or why I should give any credence to his snarky remark where he picked two films that are not at all representative of the full Criterion catalog and neither of those films are currently on Criterion in any case. To pick a random selection of 5 on Criterion from my watchlist: Story of Women, White Material, Woman in the Dunes, Piccadilly, The Thin Blue Line.)

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