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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

You have to pick your battles, and pay for stuff you want more of. All the different apps are annoying, and it’s possible to come up with alternative solutions, but it undermines your own long term benefits.

This crowd is probably the biggest target for SciFi, and also the one that can pirate stuff the most. So if you want more Star Trek Strange New Worlds, you need to pay for the app so they know it’s worth making more. If you pirate it, all the good will in the world isn’t going to pay for production of the next season. The fact that so much SicFi seems to have good reception but gets cancelled anyway seems to point to this audience being too tech savvy for their own good.

Pay for the apps, pay for the content. If you want to sign up, binge, then cancel, that will at least give them some stats on the type of shows that will get you to subscribe again.

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The fact that so much SicFi seems to have good reception but gets cancelled anyway seems to point to this audience being too tech savvy for their own good.

That already happened when the series where only on tv, so sorry, I don't buy it.

I was subscribed to five platforms. After noticing what they did to my favourite content, I cancelled them all. I still have Amazon because it was a yearly subscription.

I'd love to buy (not "rent") electronic hd versions, but apparently it's only possible to buy boxes of DVD/Blue-ray that consistently are reviewed as bad presentation and need special hardware with DRM.

I know I should be a prime audience for Sci-Fi shows but I could not find a single one that I can bear, outside of Expanse. Everything is a soap opera, just in some sci-fi setting. Arguably, so is Expanse, but out of all shows it feels the most believable (I could totally see its events happening in few hundred years), I like the dark slant and the idea that if and when we meet non-human intelligence, it is going to be beyond our comprehension (and totally not like humans in some ridiculous makeup).

I hear you about the Expanse. The books are a blast and I'm hoping Amazon finishes the series because they are good adaptations. My dream series to watch (are you reading this HBO?) would be set in the Dune universe, with Denis Villeneuve doing prequel series covering the creation of the Bene Gesserit, discovery of Ecaz, etc.

As much as I liked the Dune books, if you're looking for "realistic sci-fi", Dune just isn't it, it's purely fantasy. One of the main premises the whole story rests upon is the idea of genetic memory, which isn't real. Lord of the Rings is more realistic than this. And that's just one point; there's a bunch of other stuff in Dune that really makes no sense in our universe.

You’re objecting to what I might call “pop sci-fi”, and while I wish there was more “hard sci-fi”, those are just doomed from the start. Big effects budgets just aren’t compatible with the very low expected audience for stuff like that. Hard sci-fi will (almost) always be relegated to low budget indie films (and those may have a better chance on streaming compared to cable tv).

The few notable exceptions include: Solaris, Contact, and Arrival.

At a certain point, you have to be realistic about how closely a big budget production will cater to one’s very specific tastes.

>If you want to sign up, binge, then cancel, that will at least give them some stats on the type of shows that will get you to subscribe again.

This is my approach. There's no point in maintaining a subscription if I don't actively use it, so I treat these services as just 1-month content passes.

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