Please Pay for a Year of Nothing | Hacker News Reader

Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

joe-steel.com

295 pointscdme277 comments

Basically there was a finite amount of content and a lot of it appeared on Netflix. Then 4+ services launched and a near fixed amount of content was divided by 4. Then they doubled the price. So now for a worse discovery experience you are effectively paying 8x the price.

There is a finite but for viewing purposes infinite amount of content.

Goodness, there are 13 seasons of Gunsmoke on paramount+.

Why do you say it's a fixed amount of content? Finite, sure, but it's not fixed.

Once you see a detective show, you basically seen 80% of all detective shows. That's why it seems that there can be nothing to watch, because 80% is basically a rehash, just with different characters and slightly different plots.

Yeah, you're right, I watched one season of Law and Order and thought "Great, I've seen 80% of all detective shows, no need to watch any more." /s

I think it comes down to personal taste. I could likewise see someone say that 80% of all soccer matches are the same. That once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. And then on the opposite end you have people enjoying soccer who will be happy to tell you about the nuances between different matches, different players, different teams, etc.

That's actually a pretty good analogy.

Isn't the issue there that some people basically just don't like soccer so they can't appreciate the differences?

I would put myself in that camp - watching soccer just doesn't appeal to me that much, so it all kind of seems the same. But I can very much appreciate the differences to people that enjoy watching the sport, and I think this could be said about nearly any endeavor.

> Isn't the issue there that some people basically just don't like soccer so they can't appreciate the differences?

Yep, hence the first sentence of my comment: “I think it comes down to personal taste.” :D

I think that soccer has a problem where the goalies are so effective that the game often comes down to attempting to shoot on the goal as many times as possible in the hope that eventually the goalie makes a mistake. Things are made worse by the fact that when the goalie gets the ball they generally throw it most of the way down the field; effectively resetting the state of the gameplay.

As a result, any given segment of the game is not particularly relevant to the outcome; what's relevant is basically the overall time of possession/goal attempts across the various segments of the game.

Compare that to something like football where the outcome of a given play depends much more overtly on the play the QB decides to run, the skills of the players, how the strengths & weaknesses of the two teams match up, etc. In addition, there's a greater degree to which the plays in a possession build upon each other in order to contribute or take away from a team's ability to score during that possession.

I dont have stats on hand but I promise you a relatively small proportion of goals are scored on keeper errors, even if you expand the category to "shouldn't be beaten from that angle" type stuff instead of an explicit error. I suspect you do not watch much soccer.

The point that I'm trying to get at is that, I agree with you that there's a sense in which different people are going to prefer different things, that people who are more invested in a given sport are going to be able to see more of the nuance in it, and that as someone who's not invested in soccer there's certainly a lot that I'm missing.

However, I don't think that it completely comes down to personal taste. There can still be areas where the flow of a soccer match can be more samey or less intrinsically exciting than in certain other sports.

For example, soccer doesn't have the same moment to moment, head to head, back and forth of something like tennis or boxing. That's not to say that it completely lacks those moments of conflict; say when a defender is staring down an oncoming striker. However, as far as I am able to tell, they are less dense compared to something like a tennis match where they take up the whole of the playtime.

Ah yes, https://xkcd.com/915/

There are only two certainties in life:

1. There’s an xkcd for that

2. Simpsons did it

https://thomaspark.co/2017/01/relevant-xkcd/

https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/The_Simpsons_Already_Did_I...

I kind of dislike XKCD strips like that because they seem to encourage people not to think. In actuality the issue may be much more nuanced:

- Perhaps different things do have a greater or lesser degree to which they lend themselves to deep analysis & enjoyment

- Perhaps engaging in meditative analysis of some interest such as wine is valuable in itself even if it is mostly arbitrary what people choose to analyze.

- Perhaps the decision that wine is worth studying was mostly just an accident of history, but now that it's become part of culture failing to engage with it represents a failure to engage with valuable cultural traditions.

Any of those ideas and others might be worth agreeing or disagreeing with. However, it sometimes feels like people just read the XKCD comic and don't think beyond "wine snobs dumb".

Edit: To be clear, I'm not trying to say that the parent post is doing that. Just that I'm not a fan of how XKCD engages (or more specifically doesn't engage) with some issues.

If you've seen one episode of Law & Order or House you've seen every episode in the series.

And at some point, you'll feed all that stuff into GPT-(N+1) and get as many new shows as you want.

That will be too much work, most will subscribe to a few curators with matching taste that fulfill all your content needs. Can we eventually do away with other people entirely? Idk

to make streaming economically viable there will need to be Gpt-x that watches the content too.

You don't understand how people (especially kids) work.

Honestly detective fiction is perhaps the worst format you could give for your example, because the structure of the story allows you to essentially tell a different short story with different characters every time. Moody Twin Peaks has almost nothing in common with the goofball Psych (except the one tribute episode). Inspector Lewis plots are complex and intellectual, while Castle is fluffy and predictable. Recipes for Love and Murder, Brokenwood, Midsomer Murders, and Murdoch Mysteries are more about life among the varied settings than the murders; the murders give us an excuse to explore the characters around them.

Though maybe the most important point of that is that watching TV from different countries will make your viewing more interesting.

Agreed. Police fiction is a good format.

You can vary it by focusing on a realistic procedural, or the mystery, or ditch the mystery and just focus on characters. And police shows vary a lot by country; shows from the US, the UK or Norway will be wildly different.

So you must like detective fiction, eh?

You’ve won me over and to your point you can have a Fr. Brown (1950s Catholic priest detective) and a Dexter (blood splatter analysis turned serial killer).

Now of course the basic premise is always the same good (but conflicted) guy sees bad thing done, investigates, finds bad guys and reconciles one small aspect of world and maybe one small aspect of self discovery.

Heck, most shows have this arc now that I think about it from Sherlock to dr house to those criminal lawyer/police shows.

Nit: Basically all stories have a form like that.

(I _think_ detective stories specifically choose for the protagonist to want societally-sanctioned retribution. The protagonist then has to publicly demonstrate that the antagonist deserves retribution, rather than take retribution on their own. And the stories also assume that society can and will inflict retribution on the antagonist once the society's rules are satisfied.)

The more hardboiled the detective story, the more they are willing to seek non-socially sanctioned retribution. It's kind of funny because Father Brown partially refutes both parent and GP: the police never arrest the right guy, and the priest is neither conflicted nor in need of self-discovery, and is motivated mostly by a need to carry through God's mission of forgiveness through repentance.

There are other aspects that you're both missing. One is the puzzle aspect: Detective Conan is almost entirely these kind of alibi and murder weapon tricks. There's only so much you can do in 25 minutes to characterize, after all.

The other aspect in common is dealing with the problem of evil, specifically what drives people to the edge, to the ultimate transgression. So often I'll spend more time thinking about the perps than the detectives.

There was a show I watched every episode of, not because I particularly liked it but it starred one particular actor that I really wanted to watch.

I'm rather embarrassed to admit this, but there it is.

Why embarrassing? I also do this on occasion. Sometimes I acknowledge the show isn't very good but I really like the actor or actress.

Was the show Gumby? Haha sorry, I had to!

No need to apologise!

TTTT I have never seen that show though I know what the character looks like. Nowadays I suppose it's on youtube but I don't even care.

Once you've read one HN comment you've basically read 80% of all comments.

Does your comment scale? And is it written in a memory-safe language?

Well, Netflix was licensing a lot of the content that HBO and Disney were making. Of course more content is now being made but between covid and the writers strike as indicated in the article, there certainly isn't 4X as much content being made. Apple is making content that definitely wouldnt have existed but again, as budgets get constrained as these services seek profitability there really isn't an explosion of new content. I am only a casual consumer of media, so not an expert.

However, I doubt just because there are 4x streaming platforms there are suddenly 4x studios capable of producing even a low budget show. Knowing nothing of media production, but I assume there are a large number of technical roles which are advisable if trying to produce mainstream content.

The number of scripted shows tripled from 2009 to 2022. From 210 to 599.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/peak-tv-2022-co...!

This was also the period where Netflix et al discovered that shows become more costly to make and less likely to get brand-new subscribers around season 3. So it’s hard for me to give that statistic any weight.

> This was also the period where Netflix et al discovered that shows become more costly to make and less likely to get brand-new subscribers around season 3.

This isn't the only reason I stopped watching shows, but its certainly a contributing factor. Kinda gets old seeing some cool first season setup a bunch of interesting story arcs, great show, etc and then cancelled.

Yeah, if Netflix wants to do short shows, they should follow the British model of TV series. Short series but with a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Not this bunch of half started stories that just stop.

Netflix is just following the Japanese model of animated series where you put out an incredibly strong season one and then cut all funding to it.

Most of those are just advertisements for the source material. Anime originals plan things out and wrap up nicely (unless Gainax, but even that is an old meme now)

cough 1899 cough

I'd been a Netflix streaming subscriber since.. I don't know when? As long as the service has existed, most likely, and DVDs before that. Even so, by earlier this year I'd already been thinking about cancelling for a while. Much of their content seems pretty mediocre these days, and there's just so much of it. When they cancelled a well executed first season show that was so clearly an introduction to a bigger story.. that really made the decision to cancel a no brainer.

For Netflix, it's not just about new shows driving subscriber count. I'm probably summarizing incorrectly, but it also has to do with their royalty structure. Canceling a show after two seasons allows them to save a ton of money by short-changing their creators and stars, while still getting headlines about signing huge-figure deals with those same people.

[source]: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/tvs-new-...

This is why I said that "Netflix et al discovered that shows become more costly to make" in the GP, but thanks for providing a reference.

An often-heard complaint is that Netflix cancels shows after a single season, despite there being a really enthusiastic fanbase for them.

The number of scripted shows is completely irrelevant when they don't say anything about the total number of episodes. Instead of six seasons of one show, you could just be getting one season each for six different shows.

Hard to call that an improvement when it leads to shows getting cancelled right as they start to become interesting, leading to their storyline never getting resolved.

There is certainly plenty of talent in Hollywood sitting around most of the time. Downtime is a well established phenomena of the business as you wait for another gig. Beyond that, there are plenty of people looking to break into showbiz. If you throw around money, more shows get made. Quality can thin as top talent is spread across more shows but we're nowhere near the maximum throughput given infinite dollars.

It's not cost effective though. It's more a matter of fixed viewership.

Does anyone has experience with cancelling and switching services periodically so that you can access all the content, but not at the same time?

I don't but know folks who do. They keep track of things they want to watch until they get to the point where subscribing for a month makes sense then cancel at the end of the month.

The hard part is keeping track of what you want to watch and what service it's on and whether it's still there when you want to watch.

justwatch.com helps a lot with this. For each show, it tells you in which steaming service it is available. You can also track and wishlist everything.

I use Reelgood app/site for this.

That sounds like a lot of work.

I just subscribe every few months to each platform and see what they have new.

I do this. Don’t track as closely as I should, but do periodically subscribe/unsubscribe from HBO, Peacock, and Netflix.

This is basically incompatible (or at least really difficult) with password sharing, but then the streaming companies are trying to erode that bit of their moat.

This works, but you're quickly getting into more effort than piracy. Valve figured this stuff out many years ago.

We cancel each service as soon as we subscribe (easy through Apple subscriptions.

Most of the time we don’t even realise the month has passed and the service has cancelled until we want to watch something on the service, then it takes 15 seconds to resubscribe.

Apple has changed the game in so many ways. This is definitely one of them.

Were any of the services hard to cancel before Apple? I didn't think so. Maybe Amazon Prime (which is more than just a streaming service). For the rest, I don't recall any dark patterns or required phone calls to some sort of "retention specialist". Just go to the website and click cancel. If anything, it was Netflix that led the way on this, and set the example that the others followed. Am I missing something?

A single pane into subscriptions that you can end, or later re-start, with a click or two.

It’s not only the ease of subscribing, or canceling, but the ease of seeing all of your subscriptions and managing them all without doing any work to set up that view.

This is very interesting, so basically from 30 days in it is free until you decide to watch something, so even if you subscribe every time to the same service you can squeeze one or two days for free once in a while.

I managed to get my Netflix entire account deleted with all of my bookmarks on where I stopped watching what because I haven't re-subscribed for a while. I suspect they have some kind of grace period before your data gets purged. If you hit it you will have to create account anew and it will be completely blank new.

I do this. I don't watch enough that it makes sense to have multiple subscriptions at the same time. The default is subscribed to nothing, then if I hear about something I want to see I'll subscribe to that for a while.

I do have Amazon Prime though, so some of the subscriptions are to channels on that. I'll drop it for sure when they put ads on everything.

I also enjoy every streaming service solving many technical problems the others have already solved.

The most painful one for me right now is that Paramount+ has all their videos rendered with black bars top and bottom. So when I watch the latest Star Trek New Worlds and Star Trek Discovery on my 34" 1440p ultrawide, it literally has a black border all the way around the edge. Watching the same episode on Prime Video, it entirely fills my screen.

I've reported this to them a couple times over a year and they haven't done anything about it. I imagine, most likely, this is possibly some kind of combination of compatability with some devices that need videos rendered at a certain resolution and not wanting to have too many different encodes of videos. But it is quite annoying not to be able to have the video fill my screen.

Isn't that just a regular aspect ratio issue? If the content is filmed in 1:2.4 and you're trying to watch it on a 16:10 screen, it's always going to be letterboxed.

In that case, if it doesn't look letterboxed then it's either stretched (deformed) or parts of the video are cropped/lost.

I think they're saying that the base content _itself_ has the letterbox "burned in", so that when they watch it on their TV (with an wider ratio) it has black borders on all four sides - at the sides because of ratio mismatch, and at the top and bottom because they're present in the base media.

This is correct. There’s a total black border on all 4 sides. Because the black bars are rendered into the top and bottom of the video. On a 1080p display it full screens fine but with a display with the native wide screen aspect of the actual video I can’t actually have it fill the screen.

But only on paramount+

This used to be a problem with VHS/DVDs when widescreen TVs first came out. TVs often (and maybe still do) had a mode to zoom in to cut them off.

People expect black bats on the top or the sides but not both.

If it's "both" someone somewhere messed up, if you're in the 99.x% of users not experimenting with aspect ratios or resolutions.

It is both :)

The problem is the black bars top And bottom are rendered into the video. I happen to have a 34” ultra wide which is the native aspect of the actual video. But I can’t actually watch it full screen. But only on paramount+. Works fine on Amazon.

The thing for me is that the media companies that thought they could just launch their own streaming services and keep all the money for themselves completely devalued the engineering of Netflix. It was "FAANG" for a reason. Viscerally, Netflix doesn't feel like it belongs alongside Google, but it did, because it was good.

How does Disney fail to make money off Star Wars? Because they decided to build a shitty tech company in-house instead of just doing what they know and licensing their content to the experts.

They had to have it all, and they played themselves.

this is factually incorrect. Disney bought a very successful sports streamer BAMTech to power Disney+

Oh, Jesus! BAMTech! How could I have forgotten a member of the vaunted FAANGB

Can you tell me how that changes the story for you?

it discounts the entire parent post. BAMTech wasn't a shitty in-house development, it was a billion dollar buyout of the widely acclaimed MLB streamer.

Disney is also a huge tech company, and has been one for a while. They didn't buy a system for managing theme parks off the shelf.

Disney is a huge tech company in the same way Lockheed Martin is a huge tech company.

DIG or Disney Internet Group circa the early naughts was legit talented and influentially working in technology. Then the pyramid of management death arrived.

Protip and disclaimer: never work for Disney as a contractor. They'll blame you for their own faults and bring the lawyers out on you for shiggles.

huge +1. I havent worked in the encoding/delivery/CDN space for a few years but BAM was great. They aren't "pulling an HBO" as far as I can tell; they skipped the painful build your own platform from scratch learning experience. _Maybe_ Disney could have taken a different business approach with licensing. And arguably they took a bath on Disney+ costs initially. But I certainly wouldnt fault their technical implementation nor would I guess that content management/encoding/packaging/delivery is going to be a meaningful business problem for Disney+.

Netflix's tech is unremarkable now, though it was impressive 10 years ago.

The tech difference from a user's perspective between HBO, Disney, Hulu, and Netflix today is nil.

Netflix has caching boxes at every major ISP and has been randomly knocking over their own services for several years to ensure they can recover without significant manual intervention. Even if the customer experience isn't that much better, their content delivery is almost certainly much cheaper per stream.

Beyond that, you don't have to _rebuild Netflix_. Even if you do a good job, that's very expensive. It's folly to think you're going to make more money doing that than you will striking very favorable licensing terms with a fairly desperate tech company. Keep the "we could just build Disney+" in your back pocket as a threat.

Given the existence of torrents, it really wasn't. Ever.

Some may claim that sonarr + jellyfin give them a better experience than the commercial service. Locally cached, all services combined, low fees for VPN. Password sharing with friends.

There was a time when this was to much hazel to set up compared with a Netflix subscription.

It still is quite a hazel. I find new issues popping up at least once a year that requires technical know how to resolve. The average person isn't going anywhere near that beside a simple torrent setup.

That's nuts!

Yep, I know. Some of the configuration can be quite squirrely.

I think Netflix still has an edge on syncing progress across devices making it seamless to switch devices (ex iPad to apple tv) mid-show and just keep watching, although I haven’t tried the others for that recently.

You sort of defeated your own point. This is an edge case, not a purchase influencing decision.

I can’t square your comment with the fact that my experience of the other big name streaming services has been just as good as my experience with Netflix. They basically all just work almost all the time.

If Netflix has more valuable technical excellence it should show in the customer experience of the product.

HBO's app is a dumpster fire, but disney+ is quite nice.

The recent Max UI revamp was awful and completely unnecessary. It looks worse and I personally find it harder to find what I'm looking for.

I disagree. Amazon Prime has an obnoxious UI, HBO until recently at least was even worse. Those other providers feel like these airplane interfaces for media, there is some flimsiness to it.

yeah, from the ones I a have used (Netflix, Disney+, Prime, Maxdome) only Prime is atrocious, all others are not perfect but usable.

I found Netflix to be getting worse and worse till I finally cancelled 1-2 years ago. The interface was doing weird stuff, more and more autoplay, weird suggestions, search results turning to shit.

They were working towards being as bad as prime, but prime was "free" if you subscribed to at least one twitch channel, and Netflix kept raising prices.

Technology doesn't seem to be the sticking point that keeps people at particular streaming sites. It's the content that rules the decisions about which service, at least based upon all of the discussions amongst the internets and friends and family.

To be fair, if they started bad and stayed there (kinda like Amazon), I probably wouldn’t have minded as much. But getting worse over time? Thanks, but no thanks.

As an Apple TV user, I'd mostly agree with this, especially as everyone except Netflix is able to make their platform work with Up Next etc. on the Apple TV. The only streaming app I have that is worse than Netflix is Amazon's but that's mostly because the UI is completely unusable on an Apple TV. Their catalogue is also reminiscent of the 50p bargain basket at Blockbuster, just shit that nobody else wanted.

Is this a case of can’t get it to work or won’t work on it yet?

With some businesses the drive for features may be driven by the number of users using that feature. I wish my Apple TV could add Netflix to the up next based on which profile we were using.

But it’s not a deal breaker, would be nice.

So I wonder if the work required to get it on there would take resources from areas that more customers are using?

It previously worked till Netflix decided Apple shouldn't see Netflix library or usage and pulled it.

It sort of worked with the app..

https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/netflix-apple-tv-app/

Then with TV+ it didn't...

https://bgr.com/business/netflix-apple-tv-new-service/

Of course, now most smart TVs fingerprint what's on screen and sell that data so the data is out there.

Meanwhile, here's who plays (literally) nicely:

https://support.apple.com/en-nz/HT208083

The 'channel' subs are most seamless, but heads up Apple doesn't let 'channels' list some of their less family oriented content while apps can.

Yeah, it's very much a case of Netflix thinking they're more important than Apple or the end users and deliberately not playing nice. The end result in this house is that we barely watch anything on Netflix because new episodes aren't tracked along with literally everything else that we're watching. Doesn't help that 99% of their output is lowest common denominator garbage; compare and contrast Dopesick on Disney+ and Painkiller on Netflix - the former being one of the best, most moving dramas I've watched in years, the latter one of the most superficial, turgid things I've watched.

Everyone replying is missing the point that the technical challenges that Netflix is purported to be great at… aren’t a problem for the other streaming sites.

The UIs may suck in some way or another, or be buggy, but the backend doesn’t struggle anymore than Netflix with serving 4K streaming video to me.

Maybe their costs are higher because their technical expertise is less… I’m not sure.

HBO’s offering is particularly terrible. It’s amazing how often it just … pauses with a blank screen. Or thinks that I am episodes back in my watch history.

I have not really encountered anything like that in a few years. It was pretty bad back when HBO Now and Go were newer, though.

Not really sure what is so bad about the delivery of Disney+, if anything it’s categorizations are cleaner and simpler (perhaps in part because they have less content). The ui is imho less annoying then Netflix. But I have both services and in the end there’s really not much difference in how well they stream.

So now we start complaining about competition and not care about monopolies at all? You seriously want all the power given to Netflix?

As a Star Wars fan, Disney’s failure on this topic isn’t technical at all. The content is just mediocre; it doesn’t excite or motivate one to watch, it feels bland and commercial. What they’re doing to other franchises — and notably Pixar’s work — is quite similar.

Except for Andor, which is fantastic.

Content is king. The tech barely matters. Especially since they made recommendations be subservient to marketing.

> How does Disney fail to make money off Star Wars? Because they decided to build a shitty tech company in-house instead of just doing what they know and licensing their content to the experts.

They may or may not have tech issues. Their issues with Star Wars are far larger than anything having to do with tech, starting from the fact that apparently no-one associated with Star Wars in over a decade appears to like, understand or even be more than superficially familiar with Star Wars.

In the particular case of Rian Johnson, if one only examined The Last Jedi it would not be clear that he is even superficially familiar with cinema, film, science fiction, space opera or simple storytelling. The Force Awakens may have been bad fan fiction, but TLJ was something I’ve never seen before: hate fiction. Actually, maybe ‘hate’ is too strong a word: perhaps TLJ is evidence of a creative team who doesn’t appear to hate Star Wars so much as resent it. They appear to have resented it for existing, for being successful, for being a world they had to tell their stories in. But it’s resentment tinged with something verging into hatred.

I honestly believe that for generations to come Disney’s squandering of the Star Wars franchise will be taught in schools alongside the New Coke fiasco. It’s remarkable: while success would not necessarily have been easy, Disney could have churned out low-effort dreck like TFA for years. It would have been bad, but folks would have eaten it up.

My assumption was that Disney makes content for children, and children don't have the same quality standard as adults. The story only needs to be good enough so adults are willing to sit through it on repeat every day for a year.

For Disney, Star Wars exists to sell Lego sets and trips to the theme park.

I'm waiting for Freenet 2023 to reach 1.0, then someone can build our P2P piracy websites.

One counter point to why I personally pay for Disney+ is that I have kids, and kids love repeat content. I don't think new content particularly matters to them, at least not at their age.

I wonder how much Disney+'s numbers will be helped by that tranche of subscribers.

  kids love repeat content

This is very true, to a certain age. My kids would watch some things over and over again, until they reached a certain age when there was an abrupt change. Once that change happens it's polar opposite, they could not fathom watching something a second time.

What age was that in your case?

Not OP, but until I was about 10 or so, I wanted to watch Lion King 1 and a Half nearly every week.

yep, around 10 as well

I'd say around 10 also. For the past year, my 3 year old wanted to watch the same episode over and over and my 10 year old tried to talk her into whatever the new episode was.

My roommate in college watched Gladiator every single night for like a full year.

Were you not entertained?

I thought I double-posted, but you beat me by 1 minute! Verbatim!

Why??

Not exactly sure. Strange guy. He liked to fall asleep to the same movie every night.

Deep seated reasons he probably hasn't spent the time exploring.

I'm 43. To this day I can put Aliens on in the background on Plex in my office while I'm working. I could watch it every single day. One, it's an exceptionally well-crafted action movie (the first action scene doesn't even take place for almost one hour into the film), and the second, my Mom is very much like Ellen Ripley, even down to appearance and build - long, curly black hair, pretty, smart, driven, soft and caring, but harsh and brash when necessary.

It took me many nights smoking cigars and sitting around discussing movies with my friends before it dawned on me that's why I enjoy Alien and Aliens so much. I'm basically watching my Mom be a space trucker Xenomorph-killing badass.

One of my flatmates was watching GoT on max volume, one or more episodes every night. I got pretty darn tired of the intro jingle blasting every damn night at like 3am.

I can’t even imagine how crazy it wouldve driven me if it was the same movie every night instead. Different episodes of the same show was bad enough. I probably would have moved out.

We should all do this.

> kids love repeat content

Then may I suggest a DVD player?

May I humbly suggest that VHS is superior to DVD for young children, because you can manually censor naughty bits out of “too adult” movies by scratching the magnetic coating off the tape

You can do the same thing with a DVD if you have a needle and a steady hand.

Thank you for this, it was a great laugh.

That's too hard. Just use C-x M-c M-censordvd in emacs.

A magnet works as well and doesn't affect the lifespan of the tape as much.

It would be VERY hard to erase just a small portion without damaging the rest.

I have not done this myself, but I had a friend who did. You just pull out the part you want to erase, run a magnet past a few times, then wind it back up.

This sounds like creating an unauthorized derivative work, which is punishable by no more than life imprisonment!

Or record something else over that moment, bonus points if it's related to an in-joke you already have about the movie.

Plus, VHS players are better for holding sandwiches.

But they don’t come with a cup holder

Honestly, streaming easily wins when you consider the entire family can stream on any screen in the house and Disney DVDs are actually pretty expensive.

You could always buy them from a thrift store for $1-2 or borrow them from the library, and rip them to a jellyfin server. My kids don't know Disney exists yet and I don't see that changing for a few more years, but if they did, they'd be watching Homeward Bound or something.

That'd be a neat legal detour. However for those who don't care, simply downloading requires less effort once you got the framework (usenet, torrent, sonarr, radarr) set up. Personally I am done with the silly streaming fracturing, except for my kids. So I will keep Disney+ at least, Prime cause it is cheap, and likely will ditch Netflix (not enough value)

It's worth it to not be spied on. Kids who grow up on streaming will have surveillance-advertising profiles before they're old enough to understand what they're consenting to.

We bought a DVD player and a couple high quality DVDs. Seemed rather silly to pay for a year of nothing just to watch reruns. Kids are happy, and now we get to show them higher quality shows.

My kids like repeats, but not THAT many repeats… and they mostly like tv shows. A full run of a TV show on DVD is around $50. So less than 3 tv shows would pay for a full year of Disney+ with all the shows.

Also, my kids go through phases… watching the same shows on repeat, then switching. It would cost way more to buy the shows than stream them.

We hit up the local library and Goodwill. Streaming dollars get a lot of movies that way, and reduced ads.

But having kids can totally justify a Disney+ subscription.

There are also many people on ebay selling bulk lots of dvds for pennies apiece. The top search result right now for “disney dvd lot” is $140 for 600!

Same, and the reduced strain on my internet bandwidth has also helped me. Now is the time to buy, as physical media is quickly disappearing.

Libraries are also excellent resources for this kind of thing. Also, they have great audio book players for kids. My son is currently listening to the Hobbit, and my daughter to Charlotte’s Web.

The Hobbit audiobook? Hmm, at which age? Seems like a different age category than Disney+.

A couple, or a few? Unless they are watching the same two shows over and over for an entire year, that's quickly gonna cost more than $100.

Used DVD's are cheap.

Libraries carry DVD's, and some libraries also have streaming services available for free.

There's thousands of kids dvds on amazon for less than $5. I'm sure the right garage sells would have a treasure trove for less.

You can buy a lot of content for less than $100, and even include a few higher priced favorites.

I think you'll be surprised how economical DVDs can be bought for.

Also why limit to 1 year's budget? The magic of owning assets over renting is you keep them. If you spend 100$ a year on DVDs you'll fill up a shelf in short order.

Best of all: you can pick what you want. So often I've read a recommendation for a high quality movie only to have no method to watch it despite paying for Disney and Netflix. I remember as a kid Netflix had everything, now it appears to have nothing. Meanwhile the high quality classics are the exact ones cheap and easy to buy in DVD form.

Not to mention, this year is only the start. If streaming services are not bad enough value for you now, wait a few years. They are only going to get worse.

This is why Max bought exclusive rights to Sesame Street.

This is why Amazon has Nickelodeon.

The services know it's harder to do the streaming juggle when you have kids.

There's something a bit twisted about using my kids for their own financial gain. Hence my pirating of said shows - no issue getting those repeat views in via Plex/NAS.

I keep thinking about Plex but I struggle with the idea of teaching my kids that stealing is okay. Like, for a little kid: "This kind of theft is okay, this kind of theft isn't." seems nuanced for a little kid.

I have a bigger struggle with trying to tell them "Someone in a special building far away can make up a rule that says I'm not allowed to arrange the bits in one section on my computer in the same order as the bits on somebody else's computer because they did it first. If enough special people agree, they can give themselves permission to come steal my money or put me in timeout in a cage for a long time."

But then it always is hard to explain things when I don't understand them myself.

Quite enjoyed that tank you.

They won’t know it’s stealing unless you tell them. As far as they’re concerned it’s just another app on the magic box that makes shows play.

Simple enough: stealing is bad, but sharing is good. If you had a replicator and could make physical things for free to give to your neighbors, of course you'd do that.

And the people who work on Sesame Street will feed and clothe and shelter themselves with the things you give them with your (nonexistent) replicator.

We don't watch Sesame Street (or much TV at all), but if we did, we'd probably stick to the pre-elmo stuff. Jim Henson died when I was an infant so I imagine he'd not be much worse off if we did pirate it. Fred Rogers would probably similarly not have much to complain about if we copied his show. Or Tex Avery, etc. etc.

That's why you need to cover up your stealing by lying.

If you own the dvd's you can guilt free run the movies from plex.

I think that's fair. But Plex isn't just for stolen content. My Plex server is full of movies/TV shows that I ripped from discs I bought. Granted that it's more expensive to do that, but that could be a viable way to ditch streaming services without setting a bad example.

For what it's worth, I have two toddlers. They're still at the age where they don't know the difference between Plex and Disney+, but I too have wondered how I'll tackle that subject with them down the road.

Why do people think it is OK to steal media? I never understand it. After university, I reduced my media stealing habits by 99+%. During/before uni, I was broke and could not afford to buy media. (Not an excuse, but just the reality.) After uni, I had a job so I could afford to buy some media.

I think a lot of people intuitively understand that there's a difference between pirating the works of JRR Tolkein, him being wildly successful and not alive anymore, and doing the same to an up-and-coming author who's eating ramen a lot. There's no difference legally, though, which is a great object lesson in how there are sharp topological differences between the world of ethics and the world of human law.

If you pay for Spotify rather than hacking it, you're really not supporting artists financially very much, right? Paying someone a millionth of a dollar to stream their music seems to me like kind of an insult, actually, and recording their song to a cassette from the radio like kind of a compliment.

> If you pay for Spotify rather than hacking it, you're really not supporting artists financially very much, right? Paying someone a millionth of a dollar to stream their music seems to me like kind of an insult, actually, and recording their song to a cassette from the radio like kind of a compliment.

This is absurd. One is paying them, the other isn’t. It’s not a “compliment” to not receive income, even if you think the income received is meaningless.

Further, the radio argument is flawed - the radio station paid to play that music for people who might record it. Johnny Torrent didn’t.

I dunno, every one of these arguments always comes down to “but I want it” and other nonsense to try to pretend that it’s ok to steal from artists. It’s the same justification I used when I was twelve and stole a pack of gum from 7-11, and it’s no less lame when the people making it are ostensibly adults.

I'm sorry that your gut disagrees with the ethical conclusion that most people, including nearly every musician I have talked to, have arrived at - I know that is a crappy feeling to have - but here we are.

> If you pay for Spotify rather than hacking it, you're really not supporting artists financially very much, right?

The majority of your money goes to the artist/right holder, "[Spotify has] an approx revenue split of 70/30 - so that’s 70% to the artist/rights holders and 30% to Spotify."[1]

[1] https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per....

70%/30% doesn't sound bad, if true; that's comparable to what Bandcamp was acclaimed for their fairness in paying their artists, if I recall correclty. I wonder what the "trick" is (if any), because I have to doubt the reality of that number. If you know and talk to musicians, it's almost absolutely unanimous that nobody ever earns a dime from any streams even if you are really popular on their platform.

Spotify is a public company. They publish their financials.[1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/370618/spotifys-cost-of-...

Do you teach your kids that borrowing from libraries is not OK?

I don't think it's OK to steal. I do think it's OK to copy, because the person I "stole" from still has his/her original.

Property laws exist because property is scarce. But if I copy your idea or your data, all I'm doing is wiring the neurons in my brain in the same fashion as yours, or arranging the bits on my own computer in the same order as yours.

"Intellectual property" is a contradiction in terms. I'm open to arguments that there might still be reasons it shouldn't be OK, but arguments from property rights or analogies to theft just don't work.

Selling you a product that you want your kids to have, but at a price you do not agree to, is twisted?

Pretty interesting philosophy.

I should tell that to my kids' swimming school. Or their daycare.

This what I use the PBS Kids apps for. Free repetitive content without any kind of monetization or need for me to curate.

Why would you subcribe to repeat content? Your argument doesn't follow at all.

Kids want to watch the same movie 937473829 times. In a row. That’s why GP said they were subscribed. I know several new-ish parents in the same boat with Disney+, specifically.

you dont need to pay $40/month for a single movie...

Same kid stage here, but I did drop down to the ad-supported level due to the recent price jump. They claim kid profiles won't get ads, but I suspect they'll reverse course on that. When they do, that will be it for me. I'm not going to pay to have ads spewed into my childrens' faces.

Children's shows have almost all been ads ("toyetic") for a long time. Paying for Disney is paying for ads.

PSA: in the US you can get a free account at https://www.kanopy.com/ by just joining a local library. Kanopy is my preferred streaming service, it has a big collection of quality movies (not Netflix-type trash).

Its free but limited use per person over the month. great service. Libby is also free if you have a library card and want to use it for more than streaming.

Libby and Hoopla: free books, audio books, movies.

Just to add: Kanopy gives you 15 free movies per month. Not enough for binging TV shows but certainly enough for 15 quality movie watching sessions per month.

Must be library dependent. I only get 5 movies per month.

It's retro but my local library lets people checkout 30 DVD/Blurays at a time and the selection of more recent stuff is pretty good, though popular stuff may take a while to waitlist.

We have Disney+ but don’t watch it super often. Our price is increasing from $85/yr to $140. I’ll probably cancel here in a few days and maybe in the future just subscribe for a month and binge some shows after they’re out.

The almost doubling of the price is absurd.

140 a year? You know you can pay for a good VPN for a lot less than that...

Can you though? NordVPN for instance comes to $67.5 for the first year and then $120 every year. I know there are cheaper options too, but not that much. Plus they still have to buy the subscription. And then dealing with the hassle of the VPN.

Mullvad? 72$ yearly instead of the price hike with Nord, pretty easy to set and forget an always-on vpn. Are clients that bad these days that hard to miss red/green on/off toggles are the hassle or where's the friction?

> Plus they still have to buy the subscription

Not necessarily...

Yeah. Mullvad. Actually good too.

Something like $5.30/mo (forever). They take literal cash (as one of the options). WireGuard support. They actually do privacy, not just market it.

Edited to fix price estimate and clarify it isn’t just for the first year.

I jumped from Nord to Mullvad as soon as my 3 year Nord sub was up. The throughput speed is unquestionably and substantially faster with Mullvad, and they don't force me to change my password every 3 mos like Nord got all righteous about. Mullvad costs a little more, but they're better in every way, including staying out of your way.

Doesn't work quite well for bypassing georestrictions tbh, which is one of the main uses of a VPN

I'm happy where I am but if I had to jump, it'd be to Mullvad.

I personally wouldn't use Nord for free.

2018 Nord's ties to Tesonet. 2019 Data breach. Repeated rewrites of site to handle false claims allegations. Endless reports of performance issues. I guess each of these things can be minimized with enough explainers but why bother?

tesonet ref: https://old.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/9adi37/i_inves...

Don't tunnel all your traffic through a VPN; only the one which can lead to civil court case with anti parency gang.

I get that. My VPN runs exclusively in a virtual machine. I'll RDP to it when I need to do VPN stuff.

Private Internet Access is $40/yr.

I interpreted the VPN option to imply violating copyright.

Even less for their annual Black Friday sale

ThePirateBay uses OVPN. $60/yr. Coupons can lower that a bit.

They've been solid and have exits all over the world.

ref: https://torrentfreak.com/ovpn-wins-court-battle-after-pirate...

Pia is great. Got it mainly because of the wireguard support. It's much faster than ovpn.

Which country has the best price? Do you have to be VPN’d to watch, or only to purchase the subscription?

Not everybody wants to pirate their content. Some of us even make their living from copyrighted material.

>I’ll probably cancel here in a few days and maybe in the future just subscribe for a month and binge some shows after they’re out.

I've heard a lot of people suggesting this and I've done it myself a couple of times. I wonder if the streamers will catch on and require a 12 month minimum subscription.

I don’t really care about “new” content.

Similar to video games.

I consume if it is new or old. If I can’t find content then I’m done with the service.

Unfortunately on all these platforms discovery is horrible unless they want you to find it.

When reducing copyright terms or eliminating copyright comes up, there’s always someone posting about how horrible it’ll be if the rate of creation of new media plummets, and I just cannot relate.

I’m not even going to get through every video game that’s probably worth playing, that already exists, before I die, and that’s a fairly new medium. Music? TV? Film? Books? LOL. LMFAO.

If all publishing magically entirely stops tomorrow, it’s not like I’m going to run out of probably-good media to “consume”. Not even close. Affect on QOL would be basically zero.

FTL already exists, so there's not really any point making new video games anyway.

I love FTL, but.. are you playing it with mods or something? I get way more replayability out of Slay the Spire.

In particular, a lot of events in FTL have very binary outcomes (literal coin flip: gain a crew, or one of your crew dies), whereas events in STS feel like they have more strategic and tactical value.

I think the big "replayability" factor in FTL for me is the knowledge that there are guys out there with win rates over 95% on Hard difficulty.

There's definitely some sameness that creeps in over time, and the events are for sure one of the places where that happens.

But to me there's something almost mystical about the fact that some guys have managed to "solve" the game to that point - that for almost any problem the game presents you, there's a way to win. Even for the ships that seem shitty, with careful play you can get a run snowballing to the point where victory is assured. It almost feels like chess - if you could just see the solution you almost always have a way to win the game.

I don't use mods except a couple little quality of life mods, as most of the mods I've seen (in particular Multiverse) seem to deviate too much from the fairly minimalist design philosophy that I think makes FTL so great. I'd love to see some mods that just add some more events or something that feels like it's thematically in line with that minimalism.

Lastly, I think FTL is one of the best games ever made in terms of really putting you into the mindset of the theme. You just feel like a spaceship captain, or like a Culture style ship "Mind", when you are doing little micro moments like quickly pulling the power from oxygen to squeeze a bit more out of the engines. Or venting rooms to move boarders around your ship. Or planning for the worst on Mantis B and pre-venting rooms. There's so much depth in the game waiting to be exploited.

Usually I go through kicks with FTL and then lose interest for a while, sometimes years at a time - but I always learn something new when I come back and I've gotten to be quite good on my most recent obsession with the game.

FTL2 will be the exact same game, but with a fast-forward button.

I think this all the time too. My backlog of media, games, books, comics is huge. And thats what is in my possession. To say say nothing of what I'm gonna get. Add hobbies and I'm pretty much good till I expire

Everything published prior to 1928 is in the public domain. Reducing copyright terms or eliminating copyright would have no effect on those works. So, either your argument is self-defeating, or losing access to works published in 1928 and later would impact QOL. It seems there must be a cutoff point, sometime between 1928 and 2023, where the QOL impact of new works ceased. Why is that -- what changed?

And, once we find the cutoff point, can we make copyright terms for works published after that point infinite, since you don't need them for QOL anyway?

People like the new stuff because it gives them something to talk about. Other than that, I agree with you, there's virtually and infinite amout of content if you start looking at older media.

Same here. Netflix is running out of old content. They were great with this for a while, but have incomplete sets of shows, which defeats the point of binging on them.

With Disney+, I can still watch Iron Man 2 if I wanted. HBO were the champions of original content and I can watch Silicon Valley the whole year if I wanted. I only watch TV to chill during lunch hour and don't need that much, but I need to be reassured that the content will still be there in 8 months.

I just want a complete list of what's available, alphabetically, and divided by broad genre.

But apparently these services assume everyone is too dumb to scroll through a long list and find things on their own.

So there's a landing page where the same titles appear in four different places on the same page, you have no idea what's available, items disappear without warning because of licensing issues, and the UI looks like something an intern designed.

Which is why I've been watching random niche user-made content on YouTube instead, and it's fresher, more relaxing, and usually more interesting.

Corporate streaming feels like so much effort for so little reward.

https://www.justwatch.com/us?sort_by=title&sort_asc=true You can filter this list by streaming service(s) and genre.

If they do that then everyone will realize there's actually not that much content on the service

I don't see how that works. Problem: our library is small. Solution: Show people even fewer shows than we have.

People can’t make sense of the shelves in terms of an exhaustive list of content. Showing duplicate results and the top 5 for some category makes it seems like there is a treasure trove of content.

There's hardly any old content on Netflix, at least in my region.

In my case old content is way superior to new content.

As far as I'm concerned, we could stop making new movies and shows tomorrow I wouldn't bat an eye. There's already several lifetimes of great content to enjoy.

I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion, but I have very little sympathy for writers. The work today is on average horrible, derivative and opposite of inspired. I'm at the point where I'm almost ready for AI to take over.

It's just that rare gem that hits now and then that gives me pause, but frankly, I can't remember the last time I watched a movie that actually moved me.

It's not that unpopular - I see it a lot on FB and Twitter. People really dislike modern media. Zoomers in particular watch and listen to a ton of older stuff.

With a few exceptions, movies are terribly written these days. A lot of people think the issue is "wokeness", but that's just part of it - everything is slapped together poorly. The quips, the one liners, the new archetypes, all pales to how fucking horrible dialog has become. Shoehorning in an Indian and a Chinese guy to appeal to those markets? Fuckit, add a talking dog.

Watch TV from the 90s and aughts. It's much funnier, dialog is tighter, there's subplots and overarching plots and character growth.

You know what is good? You know what doesn't have a writers room? Low-end YouTube channels, which have completely replaced TV for the actual working class. Watch TFL Truck - it's funny, human, they mess up a lot, and it's a good time. Then watch a Marvel shitfest. Repeat with streamers, with review channels, etc.

Too true. I love so many YouTubers under 1m subs. Keep using ad block and please support your favs on Patreon!

I've had a lot of misses with more recent shows.

Writers can put out amazing things, but I frequently have the sensation of "waiting for the movie to start" 25-50 minutes into the movie, kind of like watching Napoleon Dynamite but with no dance scene.

Every movie script doesn't have to follow Campbell's Hero's Journey, but studios and writers need to make sure that not only are we, the viewers, along for the ride but that we are invested in the characters.

We don't invest in characters because they happen to match physical traits with us.

We don't invest in characters because their living conditions are similar to our own.

We don't invest in characters for anything visible on the movie screen.

We invest in characters because they have a compelling narrative.

I don't care if the overweight kid with a good sense of humor is accepted by his classmates and seamlessly integrated into his peer group.

I care if he is a good person that does good things and that he overcomes adversity to get the girl despite others being against him.

I don't care if the non-white girl shows how bad ass and fearless she is with impeccable style while she moves to her own beat.

I care that she has a goal that makes sense and what steps she takes to achieve it.

To make us care about the characters, make us care about what they are doing with the circumstances they find themselves in.

You're the granddaughter of a dead ghostbuster. Great. Wonderful. Whatever.

Why am I watching a movie about you?

Turner Classic Movies streaming app is quietly full of win. Approx 100 curated sometimes thematic movie classics that change every few weeks, View it or lose it.

Criterion is good too. I just wish tcm app streamed its life channel.

Kanopy is great if you have a library card and like TCM/Criterion content.

Unfortunately you need to have a cable subscription with TCM to use the TCM app. They have a fantastic catalog that I cannot pay them directly to watch. I have to pay Comcast first. Not cool.

BTW cool angular animation on https://noiralley.tcm.com/?icid=espnav8-noir-alley

Same problem with sports. Asking me to pay a middleman is an instant dealbreaker, especially the cable/satellite tv company.

TCM is bundled or absorbed but not featured into HBOMax, which does offer direct subscription

If all the actors are dead you should just pirate it.

> I’m not sure what’s going to get me to reactivate Disney+, maybe it’ll be whenever the second season of Andor comes out towards the end of 2024 or early 2025, but it’ll just be the two months the show runs, and then I’m out again like the Falcon leaving the Death Star.

I don't get why you'd even pay for two months if it's just one show you want to watch. Wait until it's all aired, subscribe for one month, watch it all over a few nights and then cancel the subscription.

> watch it all over a few nights

I don't have time for that, maybe the author doesn't either

Yeah planning on cancelling Netflix too. The value proposition just isn’t there anymore and raising price in that context is insane

I gradually moved from netflix streaming to netflix dvd (consistently better movies). Then netflix closed my streaming account because I didn't use it.

And just now they closed my dvd account, because... they don't do dvds anymore.

sigh.

Disney did not get that, for Disney+ to work, there needs to be constant new, exciting releases.

As TFA says, Disney+ had a few great titles then just fizzled out. Yeah, it’s nice for little kids, but not nice enough for this kind of cost.

That was a long wall of text for stating that a subscription isn't worth it.

That said, expecting 12 months worth of new content seems a bit much (almost entitled). Not everyone has consumed everything worth watching.

On every service we have ever subscribed I’d say we’ve streamed all that we want to stream within about six months at most. After that there needs to be basically a constant stream of new (good) content or it does not feel worth it.

>That was a long wall of text for stating that a subscription isn't worth it

That was an industry insider's view about WHY it's not worth it, especially right now. He sounds like a VFX guy in LA/Hollywood, and his perspective is valuable especially with regards to "who's fault is this situation".

I wonder if that effect has a name in economics. But streaming services essentially killed themselves.

When it was only Netflix, is was great, they had a lot of content at an affordable price, consumers liked that, and plenty of people were ready to pay for it. They almost accomplished the impossible: they beat piracy without a single lawsuit, simply because they offered something worth paying the price they asked for.

As a result Netflix made a lot of money, and another company (call it B) thought: why sell our work for a low price to Netflix, we can do it ourselves and get the full benefits. So they launch their service, some people leave Netflix for the new service, so Netflix makes a little less money, and the new company a little more. Now a third player comes in with the same reasoning, and now the third company makes a little more money, and the other two, a little less, repeat as many times as you want.

Now, let's focus on company B. They made more money by launching their streaming service at the time they did it, but now, with all the other players (including piracy that made a comeback), their benefits drop, possibly below what they did when it was only Netflix. Everyone lost money.

So, by a series of seemingly rational decisions: each new streaming service made more money for the company at the time they launched it, in the end, everyone lost. There is some game theory here.

I would be canceling myself but with two young ones who absolutely adore watching the same shows over and over again, my desires take a back seat unfortunately.

I understand. I had various streaming subscriptions and now none for the same reason: if you get all the TV, candy, liquor, sleep, or gum you can handle, you don’t want it anymore. TV is a place to flip down and turn off your mind, except when you’re young and so sensitive to how you’re perceived that you actually empathize with the actors.

Some people remain sensitive into adulthood. Very much so.

I know 40-somethings like this who are huge film buffs. I wish I could short-term experience the world like them.

(Long term, it is horrible)

It's a dangerous game producers are playing. Hollywood could burn to the ground right now and I'd be set for years with the content that's already on my hard drive, let alone what's out there on the internet. Keep not producing new content long enough and people are going to start noticing they don't need you to.

> Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

TBH sounds like most $20/seat/month SaaSs that would be slightly useful to me if they had a lower $20/year personal use tier or a practical "barely getting started" free tier.

I honestly can never understand people who say there is not enough good content on streamers. Every single service I have subscribed to has way more content that I want to watch than time I have to watch it. I watch maybe an hour a night, and I have a huge backlog of shows I’d like to watch that I slowly work through. Even my current list will take me years, and I have new shows to add all the time.

Are these people who complain about not enough content watching 10 hours a day? Or just have very narrow desires about what they want to watch?

I'm probably in the narrow desires bunch and although with a sizeable backlog, most of it is not on Netflix/Prime/Disney and damn if I will subscribe another one. The current plan is to drop Netflix as it kinda dried out on my interests, and work on those others in parallel with pirated streaming or torrents. And still I only get one hour every second day or even less.

There's plenty to watch. Just not much I consider worth my time. I can count on my fingers the number of movies and TV shows from the last couple years I was interested in. So why should I pay an arm and a leg for it? I could own physical copies of the material I care about for as much as they want me to pay in streaming subscriptions.

This seems different than the other takes, though. It sounds like you just don’t want to watch much tv, so it makes sense that you don’t want to pay for a streaming service. My main issue is with people who seem to imply there is a ton of great content out there but it just isn’t on streaming services. That had not been my experience.

> I honestly can never understand people who say there is not enough good content on streamers.

What is there that is worth watching? They don’t make anything good anymore: no Seinfeld, no Office, no Parks & Rec, no Castle, no Bones, no House. Everything new is terrible, often embarrassingly so.

It’s as though sometime in the last decade all the talent and skill left media, and now we have corporations and people going through the motions but not actually producing anything worth watching.

If you like those sitcoms then you would probably like stuff on Hulu: Animal Control, Abbot Elementary, Superstore, Only Murders, etc. You can also rewatch Always Sunny, ER, and a bunch more. (Oh and "Dave" which is new and brilliant).

HBO's entire catalog is full of bangers, many of which I still haven't seen yet.

Only Murders in the Building is indeed excellent. I never could get into Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I may give Animal Control a shot — your recommendation makes me think I should.

Wonder what the knock-on effects of potentially having no new "traditional entertainment" for a while, especially during an election year, are going to be.

With all the price creeping and content being spread out everywhere, piracy and a storage array are the cheaper option. My MIL bought a piracy streaming stick at a naval base (I had to stop that because it didn't use a VPN). Before the sharing crackdowns, you could load balance costs but now it's just bad spending.

Yeah, they seem to all be forgetting the power of rampant copyright infringement, if people so choose. Love or hate it, there's no denying the strong possibility of it just happening spontaneously and then no one being able to do much about it.

Is anyone here paying for any of the smaller indie streaming services? And feeling like that's a better value? If I didn't have kids I would skip Netflix, Disney and HBO. Quality has really taken a dive.

If you have kids, try PBS Kids. They have good stuff and it's free. Also, try telling your kids you can't afford streaming services anymore. They will be surprisingly understanding because, especially if they're small, they don't have money and know what that's like.

(This isn't really for kids, but for anyone else who has a similar question.)

Dropout.tv is by far the best value of any streaming service. If you can get into their kind of content (it's only Dropout originals), it's endless entertainment for $5/month.

Examples of what they make:

GameChanger ("the only game show that changes every show") is a cool concept where they come up with a new game show for every episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsDyNOB1hZs

Dimension 20 is a D&D actual play show with high production value and an insanely creative premise for every season. (Candy Land but Game of Thrones, Manhattan: firefighter is a paladin, ER nurse is a cleric, etc.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zZxCVBi7-k

They have tons of great shows.

I subscribe to Night Flight+ (https://www.nightflightplus.com/). It is very niche and I basically subscribed just for the music documentaries. It is on the cheaper end (~ $40/year) but it doesn’t seem like there is much content added and the app is lacking (at least on the Amazon Fire TV )

Kanopy. Get a library card and register at Kanopy for free.

+1 for Kanopy. I can't remember the film but I was looking for a movie and it wasn't on Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney, Hulu, Paramount, or even the Google Play Store (I have no apple products), and my options were to buy it for $25 and wait a while for it to arrive in physical format or to pirate it.

I remembered Kanopy and signed in for the first time in months, did a quick search, instantly found the movie, used 1 of my 10 monthly credits to check it out, watched it and that was that.

Kanopy is a great resource for light consumption of media.

We need to bring back Kazaa

I love paying for streaming services that make original shows like HBO Max so I can watch Infinity Train, or Hulu so I can watch Marvels’s Runaways

I always cancel disney until there is starwars

Why? New Star Wars is godawful.

Andor was pretty good.

someone doesn't have kids...

> When Disney+ first premiered it was criticized for only having The Mandalorian and WandaVision which were both over in the blink of an eye. Marvel, for me, has had diminishing returns since then, and I would not subscribe to Disney+ to exclusively watch anything from Marvel at this point.

> Star Wars, unfortunately, is also on the bubble with several disappointments, including the most recent Star Wars: Ashoka where I watched 50 minutes of space whales doing space whale stuff. Stretching Star Wars: Skeleton Key and Star Wars: The Acolyte out into next year, with both unlikely to be as inspired as Star Wars: Andor doesn’t convince me that $109.99 needs to leave my bank account right this very minute.

As far as I can tell, there are roughly two kinds of people:

1. People that just have too much time on their hands. Or, at least, more time than they have executive function and willpower to fill it with actual activities. They are actively looking for any kind of media consumption to make the hands on the clock move faster.

2. People for whom their time has value and products are competing to be the best use of their time.

I see so many people who appear to be in the first category and will watch anything, even stuff they admittedly find boring, just to... I don't know... run out the clock on their life.

I agree with you that there are too many 1s on there. I think the problem is that passively consuming content is too easy, humans just aren't really wired for it. I am certainly not immune to it. In say 1900 if you wanted to entertain yourself you could talk to people, you could listen to someone play music (live), you could play music yourself, you could write, you could tinker, etc. The most passive consumption was basically reading, which is still a rather active thing compared to scroll tik tok or watch netflix (or both). So a lot of people instead of doing the difficult thing (creating) just consume.

"Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me)" - Disney

Let me just throw some random gibberish words: sonarr radarr lidarr whisparr prowlarr unpackerr overseerr autobrr bazarr.

TL;DR: Adult whose TC is probably $300k+ makes time to write a whole ass blog post indignantly complaining about a $30 price hike for an annual subscription to a children's content channel

https://i.imgur.com/OmLPVzB.png

Can you explain why you think this image is relevant here?

It means "don't complain about other people who have a reasonable complaint" - it doesn't in fact make you look smart.

That's really not what the comic is getting at.

Personally seeing a doubling of price while studios aren't releasing anything because of the stupid war against the actors guild is just an affront to my sense of decency.

I was going to say Disney+ was going to stay because my kids love the content but I posed it to them and they agree - let's cancel and if the need arises we can binge for a month. Or borrow DVDs from the library. Or play their switch or watch YouTube etc etc.

Absolutely true. But they brought about an interesting discussion on HN, so I’ll upvote it.

What's the wealth cut-off for complaining about subscription prices? I want to know if I'm poor enough to be permitted to say "what Joe Steel said".

why is this on hackernews !

Reply on news.ycombinator.com