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Comment by rerx | Hacker News Reader

Compared to competitors, Apple TV+ currently appear to put much more emphasis on quality over quantity in their original content. I really enjoyed some shows like Severance, For All Mankind, Trying, Acapulco, Foundation. It reminds me of the time when Netflix Originals stood for content to be excited about. What they don't have is a back catalog of licensed films and shows included with the flat rate offering (they all cost an extra fee).

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Severance was great! I watched For All Mankind and Foundation, which both had great production values but were hurt by cheesy storytelling and sometimes iffy acting.

I'd love to see TV+ try something more experimental.

They’re releasing their silo series from the dust books next week. I have relatively high hopes

Really looking forward to this one..

Can you ELI5 this?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(series) (May have spoilers in the plot section) is being made into a tv series

FWIW I thought Foundation was incredibly poor

It might not been great, but they didn't set out to produce a cheap and fast show.

The first season could have been better, but it has great production values and as far as I can tell they see it as an investment and they are not going to cancel it soon. So for now I'm optimistic about a second season.

> The first season could have been better, but it has great production values

This thought process is how we got to the point where movies stopped having plots.

Many shows have hit their strides in later seasons. IIRC I found Breaking Bad a bit boring in season one. (Granted, probably the writing was already better than season one of Foundation.)

It's a weird example of the original material like Cleons being good while stuff from the books being incredibly bad.

The acting talent is a factor here. Other than Harris, Pace is incredible. The rest of the cast? Disposable.

I really enjoyed foundation. I just had to let go of the book series and take it as a new universe and I’m really looking forward to what they do next.

I know some people are really irritated by how it differs from the book, but I really enjoyed it, especially "The Empire". I kinda want the bad guys to win, lol

Lee Pace and his character arch carried that show. Everything else was terrible. I LOVED the books and felt personally affronted with how they butchered the content. These are some of the best science fiction books every written, and THIS was the best they could do with it? The only way they could have screwed up this badly is writing egos the size of Jupiter and zero oversight.

I was not a fan of Foundation, however the Cleon story line was awesome, everything was really bad.

Apple TV+ has really surprised me. They've quickly become my favourite streaming platform, and somehow even got me interested in Major League Soccer (a sport I didn't even follow previously) enough to subscribe to their MLS Season Pass.

I really hope they don't fall into the Netflix habit of cancelling shows before they have time to find their groove (Mr. Corman was really creative and just getting good and got axed), and some of their dramas are starting to veer into the forgettable "Netflix Hallmark made for TV" territory.

Mr. Corman was tough to see cancelled but that show was hard to watch. It was scarily depressing and I while I think some people say they want a show like that, I don’t think it pulled the viewership numbers to keep it on air.

Very true. It also didn't help that the little promotion they did framed it as a comedy.

Severance, I turned the playback speed faster by 20% or something and it actually became much more pleasant to watch with wierdly no adverse effect?

Severance’s story is good, but has a ton of garbage time, like many or most other streaming shows.

I just skip the middle few episodes and feel like I did not miss a beat.

I really wish YouTube allowed 1.10 playback speed. It’s just fast enough to save you some real time on long video series, but slow enough that you can still absorb difficult subjects. Even slow talkers become fast talkers on 1.25 speed.

1.10 is perfect for most audiobooks.

There's a bookmarklet for that: https://andrewsteele.co.uk/stuff/youtube-playback-speed-book...

Only works with web based viewers, unfortunately.

document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 1.1

SmartTube (for Google/Android TV) used to allow this but a recent update has removed the other speed increments and it now only lets you use the usual increments you find on YouTube. :(

I agree, I like 1.1 speed. The playback dropdown actually has a "custom" button in the top right of the dropdown on the desktop view of the site. You can set 1.05 and 1.1 playback speeds with it. It's a little annoying to use on mobile, as you have to switch to "desktop" view in the browser and can't use the app.

I watch a lot of YouTube from Apple TV so it’s a limiting factor.

Either on my real TV, or via input switching on one of my monitors when working on tedious tasks.

Honest suggestion, try getting used to listening to things at faster speeds.

I started listening to podcasts at increasingly faster speeds, going from 1.1 to 1.2 and slowly increasing it. It only took a few days to a week of listening to slightly-too-fast-for-comfort content before it started sounding normal and I could bump it up again. Now the slowest I listen to is at 1.5 (going up to 1.6 or even 1.8 for my "filler" podcasts). Videos I can crank even higher, since the addition of visual content and/or subtitles can help process the audio information.

I now watch half my videos at 2x speed, and 1.25 or even 1.5 are how 1.1 used to seem for me.

Do the ads also run at 2x ? ;-)

So rather than using 1.10 - which doesn't exist - I should get to 1.25... by using 1.10 and ramping up?

I watch most non action-focused YouTube videos and podcasts at 1.5-2x speed and I honestly don’t lose any comprehension at all with the speed bump

I use this Firefox extension to get 1.10 or 1.15 speed on Youtube: https://github.com/WaldiPL/playbackSpeed

Apple TV+ currently appear to put much more emphasis on quality over quantity in their original content.

Which is a win for literally everybody. The consumer wins because they get a very high amount of enjoyment for their invested time. The service wins because the less time each loyal subscriber spends actually using the service the less their bandwidth costs are.

Mythic Quest is hilarious as well.

It improved suddenly in the third season, I was about to give up.

My favorite were the quarantine episodes! Comedy gold.

I felt the opposite, two first seasons were great, last one not so great. Still a good show though.

I'm still amazed that a series sposored by Ubisoft can be such a sharp satire about the games industry.

First season is OK. Same for Ted Lasso.

You can't please everybody.

Tried with Mythic Quest for two seasons and just couldn't stick with it.

Ted Lasso OTOH I'll watch as soon as a new episode pops up.

I skip most of the Ted Lasso scenes with Mr Gruff and lil' Ms SideBusiness. If you had told me back in season one that I'd prefer watching the scenes with Mr BoringHomeLife, I wouldn't have believed you.

Interesting. I also like the Apple TV+ content, but my list is completely different. I liked BlackBird, Invasion, Slow Horses, Servant, and Tehran...and mostly didn't like the ones on your list.

Watching on the Apple TV+ app on an Android TV it frequently replays the same episode I already watched or starts at some random time earlier in the episode than when I left off which is a pain to fix using their scrubbing feature which is itself a bad experience.

Same for Xbox & Windows -- the app is barely serviceable, and I figure that's by design from Apple.

Agreed. Apple TV in general has that feeling of quality. Another great one there that I'd highly recommend is Slow Horses.

I feel like I must mention though: as soon as For All Mankind decided to have a teenager seduce a grown married woman I lost interest. Then to top it off, they continued that plotline into the next season. What a shame.

Apple has a few great shows but a pretty significant amount of junk too. I don't know that it's all that meaningfully different.

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