Hacker News Reader

Comment by colinbartlett | Hacker News Reader

Really nothing infuriates me more than when CanIStream.it tells me that the movie I want to watch is unavailable to stream for purchase or subscription on any service.

I pay for Netflix, Prime, Hulu, and will gladly rent just about any film for $4.99 yet more than once per week I find films that I would need to go to a store and purchase just to see.

View on HN

It would be neat if we could easily wrap these various streaming services up in one UI so that you simply search for a movie and it streams it from Netflix or hulu if possible and bittorrent if not. Its unfortunate that in today's world this would get you sued out of existence.

That's a rather interesting startup/service idea. On setup you tell it what services you have accounts on, and then when you search it will tell you the options (with links to signup on new services), and always with a "BitTorrent at your own risk" fallback.

CanIStream.it is 90% of the way there to your idea.

Roku does this. They have a universal search and any channel on the device that the movie or show is available on will come up with the pricing.

This is something that a company such as Microsoft or Apple should implement. It would be a killer app for either the X Box or the Apple TV.

Tivo currently does this (albeit without a bit torrent option) for upcoming live TV, Comcast on-demand, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video and Netflix. There may be more now, but those are the ones I use. You search for a title and it will tell you where it's available and you can watch it from any of them directly from the Tivo UI.

It would be impossible to access content as Netflix, Hulu, etc. would most certainly block your service.

For them it's also about controlling the overall experience, not just regurgitating the content they serve (e.g. users spotting gaps in coverage).

On the contrary, Netflix recently shut down their API and CanIStreamIt was one of only 8 services they allowed continued access. I think they understand the value of it.

http://developer.netflix.com/blog

If enough customers are using those 8 services, then they're not going to shut it down with the API when they block everyone else.

It's a common deprecation strategy for APIs, and only proves Netflix is tightening control over their user experience.

This already happened with Google TV and various online video services. The original plan was to offer a service exaclty like this.

Here's something that infuriates me more. I go to canistream.it to find that a movie is available for rental on iTunes for $2.99. I then open iTunes to find that here in Australia they will charge me $4.99 Australian, which is $4.42 USD. I'd rather rent legally, but it infuriates me to see this global discriminatory price gouging.

But the additional cost goes to flipping the closed captioning upside-down :-)

In fairness, I feel your pain. The situation in Canada is similar with all digital content, to the extent that I keep my Kindle linked to my amazon.com account because about half the books I read aren't available on amazon.ca. I've even on occasion twiddled things so I appear to be living in France so I can buy content from amazon.fr. Which is insane: I could fly to France, buy the physical book there, read it there, and come back. Or I could bring it back and pay a trivial duty/GST on it. But make it digital and suddenly it's magically impossible to sell it to me?

And the Daily Show etc frequently have next-day availability in the US but show up weeks or months later in Canada. Frustrating.

There is a fundamental disconnect between what we have come to expect of the 'Net (worldwide seamless connectivity) and what corporations and governments are increasingly dedicated to delivering (nationalist walled gardens.)

Personally, I'm betting on the 'Net to win this particular fight, although if governments and corporations behaved with economic rationality the technological solution to cross-border accessibility--including duties--would be pretty trivial. Anyone who has worked in internationalization will tell you that simply implementing a few well-defined zone-specific additional charges is trivial compared to the wacky linguistic nonsense that has to be dealt with.

"Really nothing infuriates me more than when CanIStream.it tells me that the movie I want to watch is unavailable to stream for purchase or subscription on any service."

It's probably in window for in-flight service only. Ha ha only serious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com