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TV: Now What?

commonsware.com

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Re: TV: Now What?

#81
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one says you have to subscribe to ALL of the streaming platforms at once. If cost is an issue, pick 1 or 2 services, watch the shows you’re interested in, then cancel those and pick 1 or 2. Rince and repeat. You have choice with this approach and you don’t need every service offered.

While perhaps a nominal iteration of improvement, cable was this way too. You didn’t have to have the $100 /month service package. There was always the $30 /mo basic cable (no guide box). The industry simply recycling its business model in new delivery methods is a valid complaint/perception.

The tech industry's definition of "disruption" has been pretty clearly validated by now as "undercut established players then appropriate their business models with little innovation". Streaming is a change from syndicated programming but introduces its own issues.

Re: TV: Now What?

#82
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plex, Jellyfin, LibreELEC, Kodi... those are the best solutions for those wanting to manage their own destiny and TV experience. As long as one produces their own content, right?

No, just pirate. I can kind of understand why people started giving Netflix money for the convenience, despite that supporting an industry desperately trying to destroy the Internet. But now with a thousand and five different "services", continually squeezing users for more revenue, digital restrictions management that makes perfectly good hardware stop working, and ever more surveillance telemetry in the various app…

To me the biggest frustration is that they can and will pull content with no warning or notification. So you are always gambling whether or not the thing you want to watch will appear, even if you've watched it dozens of times already. Personal digital collections do not have this problem.

Re: TV: Now What?

#83
post #79

What if we ban subscriptions and have to pay per view? Of course that would be great for me because I watch one episode of one or two TV series per week when there is something I like to watch and then nothing for months. It would be probably bad for people that like to watch something every day, unless prices are substantially low or there are volume discounts. But a volume discount is more or less the definition of…

I kind of imagine a "toll road" style streaming service where the cost per minute or per view is told up front. Endless opportunity for dynamic pricing which is how the companies would justify the effort to implement such a model. Some offerings can be free through promotions or other means, and demand can be much more readily quantified on the supply side by calculating net profit.

Re: TV: Now What?

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be better for consumers if productions were available through more outlets rather than fewer, so yes.

You didn’t answer the question , are you really saying that it should be illegal for any content producer to distribute their own content on their own website? I’m assuming you would apply those same standards to software developers, writers, song writers and any video content?

Why would you assume any of that? So it’s easier to dismiss the notion?

Re: TV: Now What?

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you really want to ban all producers from being able to distribute their own goods and depend on middlemen? Yes. > Whether you know it or not, since the 1930s things have changed, TVs are popular, there is this thing called the internet and websites. So? > Do you also want to ban software developers and song writers from being able to publish their own work on websites? Maybe. It doesn't appear to be a problem y…

You agree with the fact that iOS developers must go through the App Store? Would you want it to be illegal for you to distribute any content you produce and for you to have to go through a middle man? Does that also mean if that I wanted to create my own Indy movie I couldn’t sell it on my own website? How does it help the consumer for all content to have to go through a middle man where they get a cut? And it matter…

> You agree with the fact that iOS developers must go through the App Store? Would you want it to be illegal for you to distribute any content you produce and for you to have to go through a middle man?

I have no opinion on this as it is not currently a problem and it is not relevant.

> Does that also mean if that I wanted to create my own Indy movie I couldn’t sell it on my own website?

Just like you can create your own movie and show it at your own venue, so can you sell it on your website. However studios cannot own movie theaters and should not own their own distribution platforms. Taking something and mincing it down to the smallest iteration and using that to prove that it is wrong is either obtuse or dishonest.

> How does it help the consumer for all content to have to go through a middle man where they get a cut?

Should drug companies own pharmacies? What about hospitals?

At a certain point it is not good for the consumer to let manufacturers control the distribution of their product.

Re: TV: Now What?

#86

Plex, Jellyfin, LibreELEC, Kodi... those are the best solutions for those wanting to manage their own destiny and TV experience. You can run them on practically anything and there are Tiny PCs, stick-form-factor Raspberry Pi devices (like CM4 TV Stick), and other silent small boxes you can attach to a TV for a thin client interface or just a shared media library / TV experience. It'd be nice if Amazon, Apple, Netflix…

The Jellyfin user experience would be a ton better if the client app for the iphone/ipad actually took advantage of local playback instead of relying on transcoding. Random seeks, rewinds, and especially subtitles timing are all better if the client is just accessing a file stream. This is especially true as the codecs change and the on-NAS GPUs fall behind due to the lifecycle differences.

iphone/ipad would be a ton better if you could install kodi on it.

Re: TV: Now What?

#87
post #15

The fragmentation is both a flaw and a feature. It means we have diversity in media vendors, at the cost of a pretty high cognitive load to just watch something… which app is it on? What’s the account login? Search the device main search, then go to each app and do its own individual search. All while dodging ads and autoplay and “what’s new” and “for you.” It sucks for users. But it also sucks for developers, who ha…

I would like to see a standardized streaming protocol be developed. That way there can be a market for the client side (different apps that organize content you've subscribed to) and for the server side (like web servers are commodities). It would eliminate content providers having to roll their own streaming back ends and front end apps for so many platforms.

Re: TV: Now What?

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn’t answer the question , are you really saying that it should be illegal for any content producer to distribute their own content on their own website? I’m assuming you would apply those same standards to software developers, writers, song writers and any video content?

Why would you assume any of that? So it’s easier to dismiss the notion?

So which content producers are you going to tell it’s illegal to distribute their own content on their own website?

Re: TV: Now What?

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You agree with the fact that iOS developers must go through the App Store? Would you want it to be illegal for you to distribute any content you produce and for you to have to go through a middle man? Does that also mean if that I wanted to create my own Indy movie I couldn’t sell it on my own website? How does it help the consumer for all content to have to go through a middle man where they get a cut? And it matter…

> You agree with the fact that iOS developers must go through the App Store? Would you want it to be illegal for you to distribute any content you produce and for you to have to go through a middle man? I have no opinion on this as it is not currently a problem and it is not relevant. > Does that also mean if that I wanted to create my own Indy movie I couldn’t sell it on my own website? Just like you can create your…

So you are saying that producers should not be able to distribute their own content? Are you saying that no one should be able to produce their own video and sell it themselves?

So I can distribute my own video on my own website. So what if I get together with a group of college friends and we decide to sell our movies on a website we jointly own, should that be illegal?

If I am a news organization and do a show of re-enactments of true crime like CNN Headline News and sell it as a subscription, should that be illegal too?

And why just video producers? Should song writers also not be allowed to distribute those own content? Writers? Software developers?

Wouldn’t it be considered a violation of free speech if I wasn’t allowed to produce a video and distribute it myself?

Are you saying if I create a video on my phone I shouldn’t be allowed to sell it on my own website? I’m a producer and a distributor.

And now studios can own movie theaters…

https://www.dallasobserver.com/arts/studios-can-now-own-movi...

Re: TV: Now What?

#90
post #15

The fragmentation is both a flaw and a feature. It means we have diversity in media vendors, at the cost of a pretty high cognitive load to just watch something… which app is it on? What’s the account login? Search the device main search, then go to each app and do its own individual search. All while dodging ads and autoplay and “what’s new” and “for you.” It sucks for users. But it also sucks for developers, who ha…

I would like to see a standardized streaming protocol be developed. That way there can be a market for the client side (different apps that organize content you've subscribed to) and for the server side (like web servers are commodities). It would eliminate content providers having to roll their own streaming back ends and front end apps for so many platforms.

> I would like to see a standardized streaming protocol be developed.

Like... HLS?

> It would eliminate content providers having to roll their own streaming back ends and front end apps for so many platforms.

Oh you mean metadata. Forget it. We built a live streaming service specializing in classical works (opera, ballet...), and even within that tiny particular niche, nobody can agree what "standardized" metadata should look like.

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