With streaming, you click on it, and it plays.
Sorry did I suggest other people in the house were a requirement? Nah, it just does that anyway. Too many points of failure between the endpoint and the provider, and way too much distrust that the user may try to capture the footage once they have it, to solve all of the above problems, because the license holders don't like that.
I've got gigabit fiber now, but in my last place I had 76mbps (but in practice it was more like 60 or so). We were able to watch two streams, with my wife's instagram and my reddit scrolling comfortably. The only reason we upgraded was when we moved 1) fiber was cheaper, and 2) I changed jobs and all of a sudden needed to download far more build files (hundreds of gigabytes a week)
If we had 4 people streaming different things we might have struggled.
On the article itself: indeed sometimes I enjoyed the directors commentaries as much as the films or shows themselves. In particular Requiem for a Dream, where the director's commentary adds a lot of context.
As I mentioned, I have accumulated several DVD players over the years (different brands, even a blue ray), and all of them exhibit this characteristic.
The only commentary I've enjoyed are the Eddie Mueller ones commenting on film noir. I'll watch the movie, then re-watch it with Eddie. Good stuff!
With streaming, on the other hand, I have intermittent hangs and stuttering every few weeks, and navigating the video is worse than with physical discs (no chapter stops, skipping forward/backwards often takes longer to resync/rebuffer the stream), switching subtitles and audio language takes more steps, and other inconveniences.
Unless your provider or server is running low on bandwidth, then it stutters or lowers the quality :D
With both disks and internet my method is to copy the entire content locally before watching it. I do it even for youtube videos (also because the browser doesn't prevent screen dimming but the video player does).
My experiences with streaming vary.
- You need multiple services with the accompanying headaches.
- some content will still get yanked
- if you don't subscribe to netflix for 6 months they delete your account and you lose lists you had
- quality can be poor depending on circumstance. Even with something like chromecast 4k, netflix doesn't offer way to enforce 4k quality but seems to decidw by itself. The picture looks bad with no way to tell why.
I just bought the complete Dynasty series, about 200 episodes (so sue me over my bad taste), and so far about 5 of the episodes won't play all the way through.
I have never experienced a problem with DVD playback that wasn't obviously caused by extreme scratches. I don't even understand how a DVD player could "crash" in most cases. They are just a pipe from a DVD drive to an ASIC that hasn't had to change in 20 years. There's nothing to crash. "Bad" data either fails a checksum and skips or will give you weird microblock artifacts.
Are these actual DVD players or some sort of weird computer system that software decodes DVDs?
Do you want a photo of them? :-) Sheesh!