Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_snooze | Hacker News Reader

I happily pay for games on Steam, and for music on Apple Music. Those are easy and reasonably-priced one-stop-shops for all my gaming and music wants. I don't have to waste time with crack executables and tagging MP3 files like I did back when I sailed the high seas.

It'd be great if there were something similar for TV and movies. The streaming landscape is too damn fragmented these days with confusing exclusivity deals, libraries shrinking, and prices rising.

View on HN

I still buy movies and TV shows on Apple TV (and sometimes Amazon Video) all the time. That seems like the closest analogy to Steam. It works very nicely.

Streaming is a different kettle of fish. With streaming services I always expect my favourite content to disappear at random with no warning.

Of course, before fragmented streaming plenty of people complained about all-or-nothing cable bundles. I certainly pay less than I did when I had cable TV--at the cost of not having live TV.

Most people I know went from dealing with live TV, high prices, and having to pirate what wasn't airing to paying for one or two streaming services to get everything they want. Then half of them kept getting new services and pay more than they did for cable in the first place, and the other half rotate services, pay less than they did for cable, and still have to wait to watch what they want and pirate some things.

It's better than cable was, no argument, but it's like we passed right through the bright future, ripe with possibilities, and landed at marginal improvement.

I guess in my case, there's just very little that I feel I have to watch. So a few streaming services is fine and every now and then I'll buy/rent something a la carte either digital or physical. And once in a great while I wish I had live TV but not enough to pay for it. (I can't get anything over the air.) So, overall, it feels like a vast improvement and much cheaper.

I feel the same way, but people I know like their TV and I don't judge them for that. I have my own idle happinesses. If my favorite things to do were available on the same terms as modern television, I'd probably be pretty unhappy about it.

Fair enough. Certainly, many people watch sports and/or like to have the TV on as background. And then they end up, as you say, either adding on a lot of services so they have access to "everything." (Or they have to spend effort managing their subscriptions.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com