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.
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.
The tech difference from a user's perspective between HBO, Disney, Hulu, and Netflix today is nil.
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.
There was a time when this was to much hazel to set up compared with a Netflix subscription.
If Netflix has more valuable technical excellence it should show in the customer experience of the product.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
For Disney, Star Wars exists to sell Lego sets and trips to the theme park.
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.
In that case, if it doesn't look letterboxed then it's either stretched (deformed) or parts of the video are cropped/lost.
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.
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.
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.
Yep, hence the first sentence of my comment: “I think it comes down to personal taste.” :D
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.
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.
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...
- 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.
Though maybe the most important point of that is that watching TV from different countries will make your viewing more interesting.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
I'm rather embarrassed to admit this, but there it is.
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.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/peak-tv-2022-co...!
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.
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.
[source]: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/tvs-new-...
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.
It's not cost effective though. It's more a matter of fixed viewership.
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.
I just subscribe every few months to each platform and see what they have new.
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.
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.
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.
Goodness, there are 13 seasons of Gunsmoke on paramount+.