Oof. I guess sailing the high sees is back on the table.
We are back to cable pricing, but shows and movies are all over the place and now we need multiple apps to track us.
We are back to cable pricing, but shows and movies are all over the place and now we need multiple apps to track us.
Landing that ambiguity, and having the second season be as good as the first, doesn't look like an easy job
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48835392
(Jellyfin + Soundcloud + Bandcamp + sonarr/radarr/lidarr in this context; if you have Plex, that is also an option; you can also stick web content into this system with yt-dlp)
It's absurd that piracy is the _best_ user experience. 1 app, 1 place for your content, no licensing deals to worry about, no outrage pulling old episodes, local streaming, the list goes on.
You literally cannot pay (legally) for a better experience, and that makes me sad.
Streaming services have become the worst of all worlds.
As an EU citizen, even tho I pay for Netflix and Prime, I cannot access most of the content there as even tho it exists on the service because it's not available in my country.
Amazon prime has 2 good shows and just a bunch of D-tier movies or some 35+ year old ones. It's mostly worthless.
Netflix region locks a whole lot of content or removes it after some time. I can't watch some great movies and TV shows because "oh we don't have rights for this region".
Meanwhile, piracy provides a user experience that not just lets me access all of their content - one I'm already paying for - anywhere, but also lets me access movies and shows that would otherwise not be found anywhere else, including regional movies and short movies.
I have never subscribed to Paramount+ and people who liked TNG are saying things that make me think that was the right choice. I just don't watch TNG anymore. That's fine, it's not like content is scarce. Good content is somewhat scarce, but there's decades of known good history to dig through.
The disrespect that streaming companies show their customers is insane. I'm sure most of the customer don't even know what they are missing, the hoops they have to jump through, the mental load to switch between all those terrible, hostile UIs, etc...
Of course with piracy you can have all the content available everywhere forever.
How do you expect a law-abiding company to match that with content they don't own? Unless we abolish copyright.
Instead the content is silo'd in a bunch of massive companies that don't care about UI/UX and exist only to force more ads down our throats.
This isn't about being law abiding or not for the sake of it, it's about the best experience _at any price_ is unobtainable without breaking a law.
And yes, I'm in favor of abolishing copyright and/or significantly limiting/curtailing it. Some short exclusivity window (<5 years, ideally <1 year) and then anyone can redistribute it paying small royalties for another <5-10 years, then it's public.
The service? The Hardware? The App on the hardware? (Great job naming Apple...)
I agree that the Apple TV is the best experience one can have. It can be further enhanced by using a single app (Plex/Plezy/Jellyfin/Infuse/etc). Jumping between streaming services and their hostile, horrible UIs is such a pain. The Apple TV app was meant to improve that situation but without buy-in from all the streaming providers (which they will never get) it's always going to be playing second fiddle to the high seas.
It's not. Netflix is a _very new_ addition (last year) to the Apple TV app (which is ironic seeing how Netflix was highly integrated into ATV before they moved to apps on the ATV).
All of your services might be represented at this point in time but it can (and has) changed over time.
sigh please read what I wrote, I didn’t say piracy is morally justified, I said it’s annoying that paying all the services for access to content (side note: I don’t care about movies, when I watch anything it’s normally TV) you get an objectively worse experience when compared to someone who pirated the same media.
Spotify was able to crush music piracy because they provided a better experience. I find it annoying that the same is not true for video. There was a small golden era of Netflix then it all went to shit.
Lastly, the economics of stream vs buy (license or physical media) is completely irrelevant to this discussion. Mostly because there is plenty of media I care about that is near impossible or completely impossible to buy physical media (my preference, then ripped to Plex). If every show I wanted was available on BluRay or similar quality then this wouldn’t be a discussion, or at least not one I cared about. I find it frustrating that there is no legal way to acquire all the content I want and so I’m forced to pay for shitty streaming platforms.
Zero options to get the content you want at a fair price. Plus, OpenAI and Anthropic have paved the way for everyone: any content you can find online is fair game! I don't download any content. But, hey, if my agent does? I mean OpenAI and Anthropic can't control their agents. How could I possibly be expected to?
People expecting that the content companies were going to just accept lower revenue forever and not eventually get back to cable pricing were fooling themselves
In fact, the content companies are planning on making more money than they did under cable because since they're selling direct to the consumer, there's no DirecTV/Comcast/Charter middleman taking a slice anymore
Of course they'll sell through those intermediaries and take a cut but it will be much less than the cable companies were getting before, and will just go into the marketing cost bucket
I wouldn't be surprised if they end up basically exactly like cable, where the only people who hang around end up being the older generations in the decade to come.
Well that sort of happened for the music industry. I think people thought the video industry would follow a similar path where a few providers offer very large catalogs and then pay the media owners per play.
Instead these media owners got greedy and every media producing company decided it also needed to be a streaming company. But further, they licensed the media out exclusively to single streaming companies.
I'm also certain nobody expected that bought digital media would simply evaporate due to licensing.
Don't get me wrong, if the music industry could get away with the same move they would. But there's simply a lot more music and the ecosystem is too well established.
There have been times where I will pay to "own" instead of rent a tv show I really like, and then a year later that streaming service loses the rights to it, and so do I.
In a way I feel today's environment is less conducive to pirating than it used to be. So many fewer people have any kind of "always on" computer these days, they're using phones and tablets instead. Not to mention locked down App Stores, etc.
Cable companies purposefully enacted legislation more than a decade ago to prevent innovation until they could provide these streaming platforms for their oligarchs. Cable companies then sell to them and now are board members of the new platform.
In slovenia, one of the media houses demanded from telcos (iptv providers) to disable skipping ads when timehshifting shows (for the first 3 days), so even if you're watching a show that was on yesterday, you can skip forwards/backwards all over the show, but you can't skip over the ads (currently you can skip forwards over the ads only "a lot" (like 10 minutes), then slowly skip backwards until you reach the end of the ads, but it's a pain).
So yeah... cameras tracking your eyes (that you're not turning away or going to pee during ads) are next, and then the "drink the verification cam".
( https://siol-net.translate.goog/novice/slovenija/nova-pravil... )
Every other show is on a different streaming service, which has no incentive to keep it around for more than two seasons unless it's a blockbuster. Oh and content will get vaulted for no good reason.
I can't remember the last time that talk about a show in my inner circle made me check it. Season 1 severance maybe? It feels forever ago, it used to be an almost weekly thing.
Any good starting point for a fisherman not interested in stashing fish but just capturing and releasing?