Hacker News Reader

Comment by terabytest | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to speak about my personal practices, but I find the current landscape of streaming services unusable and unsustainable from a customer perspective. I share a Netflix and Prime account with my parents, and support for that is soon going to end. I don't feel like either of those services provide enough value to me to consider paying for them entirely by myself. The content is mediocre at best, finding anything good to watch is like going through a haystack, and once you find something remotely interesting you feel so exhausted that you'd rather turn off the tv and go to bed.

Don't even get me started on "there's this movie I heard about and I want to watch, but I need a subscription to this obscure random service and then also pay a rental fee on top to even get to watch it". It's just absurd.

View on HN

My household has one streaming service at a time. We have lists (shared reminder lists in iOS) that we make for whenever a friend mentions a good movie - it goes on the Apple TV list, or Disney plus list, etc. then once enough films build up (can take 2-6 months sometimes) we purchase a subscription and watch all those shows for one month.

Considering how frecuently movies (and third party shows) disappear from one platform to appear in other that seems hellish.

It's easier to pirate stuff.

It's the fragmentation and lack of ease of use that does it. If I had a NAS and Jellyfin setup, I'd have a catalog of basically everything available to stream; I wouldn't have to look a dozen different places to see if anyone has it available; I'd not have to worry about the streaming rights switching to another service in the middle of a show I'm watching; I'd not have to search through a bunch of different services to find where exactly I purchased it; I wouldn't have to learn a bunch of different inconsistent crappy, buggy interfaces; previous purchases wouldn't mysteriously disappear.

Throw all that on top of not being forced to watch the same ad for Rings of Power the thousandth time in a row, a much broader library of content, a better library of subtitles, and no performance issues.

I'm happy to pay for things that deliver usable experiences. Concretely, I'd gladly pay $200/month for a good streaming service that avoids the pitfalls mentioned. But I'm not going to pay money to subject myself to abusive practices and terrible experiences.

My experience is that the learning curve for piracy has increased quite a bit. IIUC you need some private tracker to reliably source things, something that takes time and connections most people don't have.

Despite being strongly motivated to find and watch things that are inexplicably unavailable to me (especially new foreign cinema) I usually just wait, and then sign up for a trial of whatever service has it a year or more after I read the review.

> My experience is that the learning curve for piracy has increased quite a bit. IIUC you need some private tracker to reliably source things, something that takes time and connections most people don't have.

Only if you want rare and older stuff (and even then, only sometimes). Anything mainstream, a public tracker is more than enough.

Are content owner letters/lawsuits still a thing? Piracy was cool(tm) when I was a broke high school student, but now that I have assets worth being sued over (and now that if my ISP cut me off I couldn't just move to a different apartment at a moment's notice) I'll just pay for the Bluray or for a month of Hulu or whatever, it's far simpler.

I have a significant legitimate media library (>1TB), I have the Plex/Kodi infrastructure to stream it to my TV, but going one step further and mixing in piracy is a step I'm not willing to take.

Depends on your country. In Germany: Extremely. Probably a few seconds of uploading (of a movie or porn, don’t think they care much for other things) will get you a letter (edit: C&D + damages, courts see it as commercial distribution, so the letter blackmails you to pay 300-500 € instead). Or you can use a VPN.

As I said in another post, I like to pay when given the option and I don’t have to jump through tons of hoops.

Interesting. Here in Chile we can do almost everything with our Intenert connection.

I dont know now that we signed the TPP11 how things are going to change.

It's very Germany-specific, the whole "commercial distribution" bullshit is what enables the cottage industry of blackmail lawyers

you just need to pay a few dollars for a foreign seedbox that is expressly designed for this purpose

you can then just set the seedbox as a source in kodi, I can even add torrents while sitting on my couch on my phone with the mobile interface

I have shared accounts to a variety of streaming services that I pay for but I largely prefer using kodi as it's a much more pleasant experience

If you are in a lenient country you'll be fine with a public tracker, and it's easy to deploy sonarr and some torrent client to download things automatically.

I haven't torrented in forever. I usually just google "Watch XXXX online free" or check a few sites that I frequent that allow you to stream them.

It's (almost) as easy as looking something up on youtube.

Why would "normal" people muck about with torrent software? I think it's mostly the groups doing (and monetizing) the re-uploads that bother with torrents

I do the same thing as the parent commenter, I pay for service, but will move from one service to another based on content and what I've watched.

Funny that the proliferation of streaming services has just decreased the duration of my subscription to any one of them.

I said in another comment I pay for some services too, but if my online experience have taught me anything is that I can't trust them to be around, or be good forever.

I used House of the Dragon as an example, I watched it on HBO max but I also downloaded it and shared it online. One of my favorite shows (Future Man) is now on D+ but I am not going to delete it from my collection.

It all comes to: "I don't trust others with the data I care for"

It depends on the movie. Friends might drop from Netflix, but there’s a lot of content being made that’s wholly owned by the streaming service itself that will stick around forever. Especially with Disney.

HBO is removing many: https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/westworld-hbo-max-the-never...

Apparently to make them available on other ad supported networks: https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/23513277/westworld-hbo-...

Besides what other have said it's a matter of time netflix starts to delete cancelled series because they are a waste.

HBO is proving that to not necessarily be the case.

This in a few sentences summarizes everything that sucks about the current streaming landscape

It does, and it feels quite high effort to maintain. I'd rather simply disengage and find something else to do. The plus side of all this BS is it might force me back toward more interesting and worthwhile pasttimes than just bingewatching TV shows and films. From that point of view, I suppose, long may the suck multiplication continue.

I'd love a website I could enter my account info for these streaming sites and turn each one on, one month at a time, with a click of a button. This would attract the ire of streaming companies though.

This would be a fun idea. Especially if this was combined with your watchlist. The website could decide you have most stuff on your wishlist for service X, automatically cancel/subscribe, and send you an e-mail with a summary of what you can watch in the upcoming month.

This is what Plex has branched into, kinda, although there's no automatic subscription management since no service wants to give up control of cancellations and whatnot.

Realistically it’s already very easy to do this. Sure it’s not one click, but it takes all of 30 seconds.

The DoNotPay app does that. You can make a card for a specific account or trial and share account access through it too.

this sounds economical but also a major chore

Not at all. I do the same thing, and the key is to cancel the subscription immediately upon signing up. You keep the one month you've already paid for, and don't need to worry about recurring cost.

But that's literally (literally 'literally', not an annoying turn of phrase) a monthly 'chore' to sign up for (and cancel) the next one.

I recently forgot to cancel a one month free trial for a HTC Vive marketplace (yes, even they got some bullshit monthly sub going), and they locked me into a year long commitment.

I’ve turned very sour to these monthly renewals and accounts I can’t keep track of anymore.

To use a deeply HN metaphor, it's kind of like pulling in a 3rd party library into your source code. No matter how convenient it is at the moment, you have to account for the cost of the ongoing maintenance over time; sometimes you look at that and decide just to never pull the library in the first place.

Similarly, if I'm on the fence about some service, this is the tie breaker for me; the risk of forgetting to cancel it. Even though I do scan my bank account around once a month, I do naturally pay more attention to the bigger transactions and can easily skim past a $8.99 for a few months before noticing I accidentally left something on.

(Fortunately, where I am, it's just an annoyance. Affording individual subscriptions to all the things I may conceivably at some point want to use would be a noticeable kick in the pants, what with the proliferation of them, but accidentally leaving on one service is just an annoyance.)

I’m now using virtual disposable card for any subscription to a service I'm not sure to use more than one month. If I forget it that means I don't use it and the subscription will end itself.

If I somehow still need it after the first month, I usually get a email reminder or a message about payment processing failure and I can fix that with a non-disposable card.

what do you use for the disposable card?

It highly depends on your country, some banks offer that as a service (most do in France where I live) in EU a lot of online banks do too (Revolut, Lydia, N26, etc) I don't know in the US, I think privacy.com does but I have no recommendation.

I have a capital one credit card that allows unlimited virt cards that basically can only be used at one online merchant. I use this card exclusively for subscriptions, then pay it off every month.

I’ve used Privacy.com in the US. works great!

FYI you can usual cancel immediately after signing up and it'll keep working until the next bill is due

Doesn't have to be monthly - sometimes I have months at a time with no subscription running at all. Once one "fills up" or there is a specific show I want to watch _now_, I activate that service and immediately cancel it. I guess it is more of a chore than just leaving them all subscribed and having access whenever - but the savings are easily worth it to me.

Binging a few shows and then not watching anything for months is probably a healthier lifestyle, but I imagine most people with streaming subscriptions are too accustomed to watching something every day/week/certainly month for that - guilty myself, exhibit above: I just assumed 'sign up and cancel in any month you want to watch something' would mean every month!

I do the same thing. The only inconvenience is it adds an extra step when you want to watch something after your subscription runs out (resume the subscription and cancel). Google play and the app store make this super easy.

I hear, it’s doable and it works but very few people do it because it takes patience and care. Most of these services use dark patterns to lure users into not doing that. If a larger percentage of users did it streaming services would quickly change policies.

someone is making a rails app right now to enable this as a SAAS. Now you have two problems ..

Still sounds stressful and like a chore. I would feel "forced" to burn through as much of the backlog as possible during that month, even if I don't feel like watching something from it right now.

Related to what olex said, if you're "saving" over $100/month because you don't have 8 other subscriptions running, you can tell yourself quite reasonably you're already saving a lot of money and you don't need to squeeze the value out of a monthly subscription that's less than one fast food meal's worth of money.

The whole point is to enjoy the service; if you feel stressed because you feel forced to binge everything to get your "value", well, cancel that service too. It is apparently not bringing you that value. That will help you get over it pretty quickly.

May be. To me it's easily worth the hundreds of Euros in savings from not having running subscriptions to more than one service at a time. Oftentimes I have no running streaming subscriptions at all. I guess I watch a lot less than many people do.

Just automate the watching process too, and get ChatGPT to summarise the content. Even better if you can let it watch with you, give it feedback, and tune it over time so it can make a value call on shows and save you the effort - "yeah I watched that, so you don't have to, you'll hate it". (/s, but I imagine it won't be in a year or two or with a skilled coder).

I use virtual cards generated on privacy.com for streaming services. You can set the limit based on how many months you want to pay for, and not worry about forgetting to cancel.

Because I view them via an AppleTV, I subscribe to Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, and AppleTV at various different times all through my iTunes account. It's easy to turn them on and off all through one account interface. The Account Settings page lists both Active and Expired accounts for all the services, along with next billing or expiration dates. It's just a few clicks.

Seems like it could be an opportunity for a website with all the news shows and movies on each platform. You check off the ones that seem interesting. It tells you what service to subscribe to after you hit a threshold. Not sure if any of the services have affiliate programs for revenue.

Justwatch provides a lot of that and I bet you could automate the rest

Auto-expiring temporary credit card numbers can help automate cancellations after N months, but figuring what shows are on what services and signing up for them as needed is still a major chore.

The problem with that is that legally, the contract to pay a provider, and the instruction to your credit-card company to pay a recurring amount, are two separate things. Some companies will send threatening letters, dept collectors etc after you if you just cancel the CC instruction.

It's different on the apple store, where Apple forced providers to agree that a subscription could be unilaterally cancelled via the store. Ideally we would pass a law so that credit cancellation also cancels a contract as long as the minimum period is over. Not holding my breath though.

> Some companies will send threatening letters, dept collectors etc after you if you just cancel the CC instruction.

What companies do this in practice. I think I’ve “ghosted” 300 companies and never had a single even send a threatening letter, much less do anything. Usually I get an email of “error processing your card, please fix or we turn off.”

I can’t imagine it is ever economical to pursue in courts over an $11.99/month contract.

The exception is gyms that do seem to go to ends of the earth to collect.

Zipcar tried to do it to me once. But it may depend on your jurisdiction as well.

I had a colleague who used to get monthly calls from a cable co. He was divorced from his wife, who had set up the cable contract, so they wouldn't let him cancel it but were still convinced that he was liable for the money because it was supplying his house.

This would be annoying for people whose credit card just happened to expire and who then have to deal with not having the service for a period, re-signing up, losing loyalty bonuses, etc.

Credit card expiry can have integrations where the merchant automatically gets the updated value

Do you have more details? I found that in my case the credit card provider has ways to continue paying for the subscription through the magic of recurring charges that is very difficult to stop (survives credit card cancelation/number changes).

Right, getting a new card number has nothing to do with the fact that it is the same account. The numbers point to the same account.

It seems the credit card providers would have an anti-incentive to provide this kind of consumer friendly functionality. Maybe Apple's card does? Any first-hand accounts?

Capital One's Eno service allows you to generate temporary credit card numbers with a custom expiration date.

The Playpilot app helps to get an overview over where (on what streaming services) a movie or show is available.

We use JustWatch[0]. It's good for keeping a "want to watch" list and also tells you which of your services has which films at any one time.

[0] https://www.justwatch.com/

I wish I had the discipline to manage things that way.

This implies there is something about """you""" that is inherently lacking rather than the habits currently in your brain and "more discipline" often means """if only I would castigate myself more"""

Market opportunity!

A meta streaming service that dispatches you towars the service that has the show you want to watch. Of course it needs to work in colaboration with the actual streaming services and diatribute revenue proportional to services' use. It would create much more real-time competition.

Are there any products or tools for managing this kind of thing?

I generally want my lists of books/films/music playlists whatever that I've seen, reviewed or marked as "to watch" to be managed seperately from any one particular vendor, and owned by me.

There seems to be some movement towards this with e.g. smart TVs that will search all your apps for shows, and sites that will tell you where a specific film or show is available, but I've not seen anything either super geeky, or super easy to use.

Without telling you to pirate: What you're describing is Sonarr / Radarr with Plex / Jellyfin.

The former lets you put in a list of shows / movies you want it to download, and it'll check against public and private trackers periodically until it finds what you're after. The media you want doesn't even have to be released - an IMDB or TVDB link is enough.

The latter makes it easy to stream anywhere, download ahead of flights, and tracks watched status. Plex especially is fantastically easy for family to use.

Setup is "easy" in that it's an afternoon or less for the kind of people browsing HN, and using it is actually easy for anyone else you care to share the service with. Combined, it checks all your requirements of pulling in reviews from you and others, watched status tracking, and owned by you.

I don't know if this is what you're asking specifically, but I use justwatch.com to see where I can watch stuff. Sometimes (it happened to me last night) one of those weird internet channels has what you're looking for...

Trakt.tv lets you bookmark, rate, and keep track of the sites and movies you watch. They also have an API which is used by other apps, such as kodi.

That looks like exactly what I was thinking of, the fact that they use the verb 'scrobble' to describe this tracking suggests they're on the same wavelength as me, so thanks for the tip.

The JustWatch app can sort-of do this. It aggregates the library index of all the streaming services so you can see what movies are where.

https://www.justwatch.com/ automates this.. great service

When clever people start creating their own personal systems to deal with it, movie streaming has a serious problem. What about the rest of us who aren't so clever?

it's too much work for entertainment, that's the whole problem. We as users, shouldn't be doing anything clever to get our content. I have 5 streaming services, and sometimes I hope from one to another, searching for a movie to find out that no one of them have it. Then going to google and find out that the movie is hosted on a different streaming service. No fun.

I have a Prime account, but I'll soon be cancelling it I feel. The same products can had on eBay for less money with no shipping charges added.

Prime video is quite unique, but I'm very much past them putting pre-roll ads on the content I want to watch. It's universally an advert for their own craptastic, homegrown version of an existing well-defined format. If I was interested in watching Law & Order I can start from Season 1, not from their knockoff version of it.

Amazon Music would be another great service I'd be willing to pay for, but all the available clients are so buggy it's an impediment to me using it.

I dropped Prime for the first time in many years just last month. 2-day shipping is pretty much standard now at Target and Walmart, there was nothing terribly compelling on Prime Video, and I never even used any other services. Why again have I been shoveling ~$12/month in perpetuity to Amazon?

Prime shipping for me is now a week or two! It's not uncommon to wait 12 days for an order that's Prime from the Amazon warehouse to arrive at my house, and I don't exactly live in a super rural area. It's ludicrous IMHO to pay for prime now when we barely use prime video and super saver shipping wouldn't take much longer than prime.

Whoa, that's unbelievably long if you're a Prime subscriber. I pretty much assumed 2-day shipping was standard for every single Prime member in the US. Do you live elsewhere? And how urban is your area if I may ask (approx. population)?

Yes, I live in Eastern Idaho, area population about 200,000 people.

> The same products can had on eBay for less money with no shipping charges added.

eBay sellers also tend to ship promptly, which used to be one of the main reasons to use Amazon/Prime. The latter's shipping speeds have increased by orders of magnitude in some parts of the country over the last couple years. It's not uncommon these days for a Prime order to sit in limbo for 3-4 days before being shipped, while the same order to the same city shipped instantly in 2018.

Prime delivery was a once a week thing in a remote town in Utah several years ago. On the other hand, my parents live in a rural area in the midwest and frequently get packages next day or two day. I'm guessing the difference is down to distribution centers.

Interestingly, I haven't had Prime since maybe 2016, and my experience was that Amazon is only capable of two day shipping, but if you don't pay for it, the item just sits on the shelf for three days, then ships.

> If I was interested in watching Law & Order I can start from Season 1, not from their knockoff version of it.

Actually you cannot. Only Law & Order SVU is available on streaming. The original series and the other spinoffs only have the most recent season available online.

Actually, you CAN. It's all over bittorrent, therefore it is available online. Which brings us back to the title question, how many of you are open to piracy again?

yeah, I canceled Prime a few years ago. I reasoned that if I needed the product fast then it would be faster to physically go to target or walmart. And if I didn't need it fast, then the default shipping would be fine.

Their add-on services all felt lackluster too. Most of the prime video content is not well-rated.

It doesn't matter as much to me now but when I was traveling a lot some determinism in the shipping time was worth a lot to me. And even now, there's a category of things that I don't need right now but I want soonish and probably won't get to the store for a day or two anyway.

It's still a decent value to me overall--especially throwing in video.

What do they charge in the US? It costs me 3 EUR / month here in NL which is worth it. Amazon regularly either undercut or price-match other stores and for 36 EUR a year I get enough entertainment from Prime alone.

Netflix is 15 EUR / month and I honestly just keep it for the kids + my wife..

In the US Prime Video is $9/month, full Prime is $15/month. I think it's half price for students.

Student discount is now time limited iirc!

I just cancelled Prime for the same reason.

If you can wait, most Amazon products are on Aliexpress for much less, sometimes 50% less, up to 90% for electronic components.

I return a lot of products bought from Amazon. How is the return policy and cost with Aliexpress?

It sucks.

In my case I got a dysfunctional cell phone LCD assembly and seller said I could either ship it back (would cost like half the cost I bought it for) or they would refund me 40% of what I paid. The system to contact the seller has technical measures to prevent you from conversing in Chinese even though that is obviously what the seller is most comfortable with.

I think it's fine if you're either buying nonelectronics or buying in bulk but I will not use it for purchasing electronics again.

When do you return Amazon stuff? I have returned online clothes purchases from other stores but I'm pretty sure I've never returned anything I bought from Amazon. Basically because I buy "things" from it, and I end up doing so much research before buying that I'm always happy with the purchase.

I buy and research multiple products in parallel. You can’t beat my system. Jeff Bezos hates me.

Jeff Bezos loves you, because he makes money each way. It's the third party sellers who are footing the bills.

You make think that you're sticking it to the man, but you're actually screwing the little guys.

Never tried it; I don't think it works too well. Amazon is probably better in that case.

Far be it from me to shill for Amazon, but I find that I can't go without 2-day shipping.

Ebay is fine I guess, but I'd lose my mind if I had to wait a week for something. That makes the $140/yr worth it to me.

Prime is still useful outside of the US. EBay shipping feels in that case can be exorbitant.

You can turn off the previews in account settings. Still annoying though.

What did people think was going to happen with subscription services? That you get everything you wanted in just one? This was inevitable, I am not quite sure why people were so excited about Netflix. It just meant that we own even less of what we consume. When you brought a disc (or even a digital version of it), you can kind of claim ownership. With subscription services? You can't even morally argue that you own it.

You are missing an important thing.

Netflix allowed a huge library of DVDs to be rented. You could have 3-4 DVDs on rotation for a rather cheap price.

This happened when Blockbuster would charge you $5 per movie, and Netflix would charge $10.99 for unlimited DVDs, but you could only have 3 DVDs checked out.

That's why Netflix was huge and killed Video Store rentals.

BTW, this is still the case. https://dvd.netflix.com/

Netflix has never dropped their DVD service even though they wanted to many times. There are still places in the US where broadband is unavailable.

Also, due to first sale they don't have same license restrictions as they would on streaming. Once they buy the disc they can rent it as many times they want for as long as they want.

I've considered re-adding the DVD rental, I've been using Netflix since they included the coupons in DVD player purchases, because they have the films that aren't available on Netflix streaming and it would be cheaper than adding the myriad streaming service subscriptions.

I re-upped their DVD service for a while early in the pandemic. It's still worthwhile if you want to watch a lot of movies even if their back catalog availability has deteriorated quite of bit. It makes me shake my head a bit that so many people consider suggesting that the idea of just watching some things on physical media (whether Netflix disc by mail, library, or just buying a movie) makes you a weirdo. (Or for that matter, renting streaming a la carte.)

There were a couple of movies I just can’t get without pirating. Already had Netflix and Prime, but to watch Chunking Express I would have needed to subscribe to HBO Max just for this one movie. There was no option to buy/rent it one time on YouTube/Amazon. This was true for at least 4-5 movies I wanted to see (yep, I’m that snob that doesn’t watch the latest and greatest).

And then I’d have to remember to cancel HBO Max.

HBO max makes me mad. A bunch of good old movies had their rights purchased so if I want to watch the Thin Man, a movie from the 30s, I need to get HBO max. No thank you.

Or you can rent it a la carte. (Or very possibly borrow it from your local library whether they have it or can get it from inter-library loan.)

Or instantly access it via the internet for free because everyone who made it is long since dead.

Funny, I'm not from the US, all I get from https://dvd.netflix.com/ is a 404 page not found error.

Maybe that's the perfect use case for subscription-based VPNs, renting DVDs from an American IP address... Hope it fits through the IP tunnel.

Actually, though the page literally has the string "404" in the title, it returns an HTTP 200 and redirects via Javascript.

  $ curl -I https://dvd.netflix.com/
  ...
  HTTP/1.1 200 OK

They probably don't have DVD rental at all in your country. Netflix in the US/CA and Lovefilm in the UK were the only DVD/Bluray mailing service that I'm aware of. Once they were able to offer streaming internationally, setting up mailorder service probably wasn't even considered.

I use the disc service instead of streaming. Its cheaper and the selection has a ton of stuff I want to basically rent but not buy. I also purchase a ton of movies on disc too. It is good for those 'hmm not sure if bargain bin is ok on the price to buy'. Friend of mine uses redbox pretty much exclusively too in the same way. We both have access to decent internet as well.

Downside, there is starting to become a decent number of shows/movies that are exclusive streaming. Second downside is it can be decently slow to get anything. I average about 4 discs per month on a 1 disc out at a time level. It used to be 6-8 per month. But they slowed it down.

I stopped messing with streaming because of the churn of is it on this one or that one. I just gave up and bought whatever boxset I needed. Then found I was not watching the streaming services at all.

You know what’s even cheaper than renting DVDs?

But also, I get your stance. I prefer legal routes over gray/black markets.

In the UK second hand DVDs are very cheap on eBay. A classic film might cost $2.50. Action trash is buy one get one free for $2. Both prices include postage.

Right! Streaming services weren’t feasible back then. We lacked the bandwidth, no apps existed (because internet connectivity outside of a desktop/laptop computer was in its infancy), and not that many people connect a computer to their TV.

People were excited about streaming services because we all got sick of dropping $20+ to buy a shitty movie or album, and there were always availability issues at video rental stores.

Ownership over movies and TV shows isn’t particularly important. I don’t have data to support this, but it seems true that people watch the (probably overwhelming) majority of movies only one time. Why own what I don’t want or need? And if I really enjoy the flick, I can still buy a disc.

Music seems more important to own since owning is the only way to guarantee availability.

Is that why Netflix killed video stores? I don't know anyone who used it when it had DVD rentals (I don't even know if we had that option in Canada).

Myself and most people I know stopped renting videos when we could stream stuff easily.

I think you might be an outlier. Netflix DVD rental was huge in the US—can't speak for Canada though. Everyone I know had it.

Yeah, it was big although it worked better for film than TV. I wish it were still bigger. The fact that so many people seem to think that just renting a physical disk is something weird means that they're really not investing in restocking older films any longer.

I'm sure it depended on your social circle/age group.

My age group, mid 20s during Netflix creation, everyone I knew have a Netflix DVD subscription. We were raised with VHS rentals, so DVD rentals were the natural next step when DVD players got cheap.

Same. It was a chore to churn through the discs and watch whole seasons of shows like the X-files, but by god we did it.

Spotify largely works as all-in-one sevice for (mainstream) music, I don't know why it would have been unreasonable to think that same could have happened to movies/series.

The licensing/royalty mechanisms for music have long been much more centralized.

I also strongly suspect that, if you look at the numbers, all you can eat for video would come with a price tag that very few consumers would pay--especially if you throw in live TV.

> "there's this movie I heard about and I want to watch,"

This is why I don't subscribe to any of the streaming services, they all utterly fail at having the movies I want to watch when I want to watch them. These services are mostly for people who want to watch something and don't particularly care what it is. TV as background noise. I expunged that sloppy style of TV watching from my life and I'm never going back to it. The only time I watch something is when I want to watch that thing specifically before I even sat down. And the odds of the streaming services I might have subscribed to having that thing is basically zero.

Adding to this is the complex web of region-limited content. Is using a VPN to watch something on Netflix more or less legal than torrenting? What if I want to watch it with subtitles that aren't available in my current region, but are in another? The other day I ended up pirating a program that I only later realized I had streaming access to via one of my streaming subscriptions, because the title was different in different regions... ugh.

Unlike in my teenage years I'm happy to support artists with my money (and do!), but it's often a puzzle to figure out what content is on what service and in what region at what price.

I didn't realize subtitles were different based on region.

Add to that the fact that there's this disquieting connection between the IP ownership and the video tech.

Couple services with plenty of good content managed to put together teams to build their mobile / web apps that can barely code their ways out of a paper bag (in the non-trivial space of high-capacity video streaming, nonetheless). It's enough to make me yell "Just give me the damn file and I'll play it myself."

Video tech for streaming is more or less off the shelf from cloud providers (disclaimer: I work for one).

As far as I know, the only two companies that have their own video streaming expertise of any note are Netflix and Disney (after the BAMTech acquisition).

Any other company with sufficient funding can outsource it.

So why does Paramount+ feel like it was put together by attention-deficit badgers relative to YouTube? Just age of software and years spent on polish?

Because there's basic fit-and-finish crap in that player that drives me positively bananas (things like "Doesn't remember your close-captioning setting" and "Doesn't let you change the setting when ads are playing"). And that's disregarding the 1 out of 50 times it fails to do the Chromecast-dance and leaves the Chromecast or the mobile device in a wacky state requiring software restarts (to their credit: that's down from approximately 1 in 10, so I've seen improvement there).

I agree. But those are mostly standard UX issues not underlying video streaming issues.

But ChromeCast overall I’ve found to be crappy technology.

> Chromecast... crappy technology.

Absolutely 100% agree. Like Bluetooth and USB, it's built to work with a whole pile of stuff out in the real world that the devs didn't have access to for testing / didn't exist yet when it was standardized, so it's got some grabasstical corner cases.

... problem is, it's also got like 36 million users, so it's incumbent upon anything that claims to be a "streaming service" to account for those quirks to work in 36 million living rooms (in the same sense that it's not Bluetooth's "fault" when the new car or headphones on the market don't pair with already-existing popular brands of mobile phone).

If we had one streaming app to rule them all, it could consolidate the quirks fixes and we'd be all good. The fact that market competition means everyone has to solve for those quirks individually and is disincentivized to share solutions is a PITA for end users.

Yet I don’t have that problem with AirPlay even with my $40 Roku sticks.

I'm not privy to the details of how AirPlay is configured, but knowing Apple, they probably built the streaming part of the protocol atop their own proprietary software tech stack (because that's how they usually solve these issues) and anyone who doesn't pay-to-play (with the corresponding cost burden of confirming interoperability with the infrastructure Apple built) is left out in the cold. Evidence I have for this is that you can control an AirPlay device from anything running Apple software (including a Windows machine running iTunes)... But not Android. Quick Googling confirms that the on-the-wire AirPlay protocol is undocumented.

That's Apple's style and it probably works better for an application like this (there are a lot of problems for which dictatorship is the solution in the technical space... I wish we had a streaming service dictator to solve the Chromecast problem from the other direction).

I have just been thinking of how to explain why the audio landscape (podcasts and music) are so wildly different in this sense.

While not perfect, you have a way less unreasonable user experience especially in terms of DRM and hostile in software and APIs, and the fragmentation and balkanization is not even close to at the same level.

Most people who pay seem content with what they do and complement with free and open (mostly legal save for much on the YouTube). Public warez is spotty outside of that and the toplists. Private trackers are extremely exclusive, insular and inaccessible except for the very dedicated.

What's the dominating factor here? IP ownership and legal differences? Market dynamics? Opex costs? Industry corporate cultural differences? Or is it just circumstance that Spotify and Apple Music have been able and willing enough to make it happen while what.cd left a legacy where insular elitism became the norm and video pirates have always been more Tallyho?

I suspect it's because podcasting historically originated from radio, esp free public and internet radio communities, whereas the film ones originated from major corporations and not like public access TV. The closer thing to that is probably YouTube in it's earlier days

I think you hit the nail on the head with "The content is mediocre at best". This applies to all of the services with one exception for me where I see higher quality content, that's personal preference though so I don't want to get into a debate about one service vs. another. I'm sure others have that one service too.

What I will say is there are certain genres or types of content where I just feel like watching that type of content and any of the services will meet that need. Rarely is there a "killer show" that I will pay for a service that hosts it anymore. If I want to watch documentaries about murderers they all have some version of that, or cop shows or home shows or ... you get the idea.

Maybe this is age showing and just the nature of how Hollywood constantly regurgitates characters, shows or "franchises" where I feel like I've seen things already when they are brand new.

> I need a subscription to this obscure random service and then also pay a rental fee on top to even get to watch it

That's not true. There are a number of services/products you can simply purchase or rent content without an additional subscription fee.

> It's just absurd.

It is.

What's needed is some kind of aggregator; a firm that will sublicence content from the major providers, and sell it to consumers. I'm not going to set up a Netflix account to watch one show.

Of course, the big content providers won't sublicence; they'll have to be forced to. But I would watch more of their content if I could pay for just what I want to watch, without subscribing to a mess of bundles containing mainly dross content.

I pay for Netflix and Prime Video.

I pirate stuff when it's somewhere else or when it's not available anywhere (surprisingly that's 50% of cases, but maybe that's just my country). So the spread availability is one of the problems, but not having a chance to watch something legally is another.

The same problem is with videogames. Some of them can't be bought anymore (excluding used physical copies on CD/DVD, but that's not something I prefer).

Pirating movies is even legal in my coutry - it's legal to download a movie that's already shared - I just can't share it. So at least they can't jail me for this sporadic crime.

Do I feel bad? Partially. I'd prefer to pay, I love paying for stuff that's even free (donations), but I don't want to feel like I'm an animal that predators want to lacerate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com