God forbid your user should download something to watch later, to prevent having to redownload every time you watch it.
And then during peak Netflix hours, I just can't use the internet reliably.
If anyone knows any source for Libre video works, that I can download and watch with complete freedom, please let me know. I'd pay for it.
Think of the wasted traffic has thousands of people watch a live stream in unison. Or the millions watching viral youtube videos only a few seconds apart.
Oh, wait, we already have that technology. Too bad we have people who have worked for twenty years to kill it.
I don't give a damn about NBC shows.
Netflix's annual revenue is 4.3 BN (i.e. over 10x higher), and the company is worth 21bn. (https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ANFLX)
Why? Sure, a relatively few people will use Tivo, but many more won't. Empirically, the convenience / lack of planning necessary to watch streaming video is worth approximately 10x more.
This illustrates the importance of using data rather than anecdotes to draw conclusions. As a HN poster, our personal experience tends to be heavily biased towards our self-selected associations with more technically oriented people rather than "normal," average people.
I expect the number of people who use DVRs is close to that of premium television subscribers. People who don't are cord-cutters or only receive a low-cost basic package.
Parent was not using an anecdote to illustrate that streaming is better/worse than downloading.
Parent was using an anecdote to prove the fact that UIs exist that allow people to store media, rather than constantly streaming it.
Consumers might not want to have to deal with HDD storage, but I would bet you dollars to donuts that they want 4K without buffering issues.
EDIT: Also, I just wanted to mention that maybe our companies should be inventing new ways of storing things (like TiVo did with remarkable success), instead of spending all of their resources aquiring the rights to hit movies and extorting each other.
It's really more for the providers and cintent owners: keeps customers tethered and paying for the privilege of suckling from server teats whenever they consume content.
Because, really, storage could be made just as easy for consumers as streaming if providers had the will.
Instead, it's "put everything in the cloud, then pay us over and over again to access it".
Comcast is arguing that Netflix is trying to get Comcast to build its infrastructure. Netflix is arguing that Comcast is extorting them for their infrastructure.
Both arguments assume that everything must be streamed, and the only reason for that is the DMCA and our copyright culture.
What's easier to fix DMCA or the Net Neutred?
But still, I have it.
Its defeatist at best, and actively promotes/degrades the status quo at worst.
You aren't making an insightful or interesting post by doing this, you are simply being dismissive and shutting down discussion.
And I understand that Australia is a HUGE country with a tiny population/sqmi so at least for the next few years they kinda have to "steal" from you to make it profitable in the long run (same thing happened/is happening with our wireless services here) but still it's not really a fair rate to charge you and you should be always lobbying for less.
A 100 mbps connection to the ISP isn't much help if the ISP only has 1000 Mbps upstream to share amongst 20,000 subscribers.
I have Cox in Tulsa, OK. It's $99.99 / month.
Since they redesigned their site, it is very difficult to figure out what stuff they have released in the past, but Wikipedia and the Internet Archive can help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VODO
https://web.archive.org/web/20130129195347/http://vodo.net/f...
Streaming (as a means of protection) is as useless as DRM except they're too stupid to not do that dance for their legal departments. It hurts legal consumers and doesn't punish non-legit consumers. It prevents you from using content you've paid for & used previously when your internet goes down. Not to mention the enormous waste of electricity/bandwidth/environment/people's lifespan. It costs us all.
Imagine if the RIAA made a law that CDs could only be played sequentially, and you had to turn the disc over to get to the second half.
The real reason for streaming is that most people don't know in advance what they want to watch, and with TV/movies, generally only watch something once.
I don't know if this is really true. How do you find out about something you want to watch? You see a commercial for it, or somebody tells you about it, etc. If all you had to do was pull your phone out of your pocket and click a button that says "download this when it becomes available" and then be presented with a list of such stuff the next time you want to watch something, you would pretty easily end up with more stuff to watch than time to watch it.
I'd like access to current creative commons works,though, not just public domain items. I'm trying to fight the copyright regieme, which prevents me from accessing the culture around me.
Going back in time to the 40s doesn't exactly do that for me. Don't get me wrong, IA is amazing, and I use it all the time. But I'd like something like Netflix that was exclusively for CC works. vodo seems like a good contender.
What was the point of this? Is your reading comprehension so poor that you didn't understand "download" to mean "download in full before playback" in this context? Or are you just trying to score pedant points?
Nice personal attacks though. I was only responding to what you wrote, which contributed nothing to the conversation btw. So that was probably a dumb idea on my part.
And lets not forget that Netflix's whole business model is binge watching, which means you could easily preload future episodes of House of Cards.