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Which streaming service was that on again?

timwehrle.de

21–30 of 94 posts

Re: Which streaming service was that on again?

#21
post #8

> There are probably a few ways to improve things. Cross-platform search should be standard by now. A shared watchlist across services would help. Apple tried this with the TV app on their AppleTVs. It was supposed to pull all your subscriptions into one interface, searchable, with tracking and watchlists and all that good stuff. One unified app to all your content. Then Netflix said they weren't going to play ball,…

I find that it's actually more annoying than it is useful

Re: Which streaming service was that on again?

#23
post #16

If only there was dozens of services for this exact issue. this took me less than a few minutes with classic non-LLM search: https://imdb.com https://www.justwatch.com/ https://streamsearchup.com/ https://www.wheretowatch.stream/ https://streamfinder.co/ https://findmystreams.com/ https://lookupvod.com/en

Any suggestions on which of these are usable? justwatch.com used to be amazing, but it's increasingly getting enshittified: they seem to be intentionally making their presentation _less_ clear so they can show ads for "similar content available on…" :-(

Letterboxd has this feature too, but they use JustWatch behind the scenes. I like how they implement it. I can filter a list of movies per streaming service.

Re: Which streaming service was that on again?

#25
post #11

Usually Justwatch should be able to tell you where something is available. However I will note that it's remarkably common for something slightly old to just not be available anywhere. You cannot watch Das Boot in my region on any service so far as I can see. So I guess you loan from the library or buy DVDs off of ebay or something?

I love JustWatch and most of the time it's given me the answer I need.

Re: Which streaming service was that on again?

#27
post #8

> There are probably a few ways to improve things. Cross-platform search should be standard by now. A shared watchlist across services would help. Apple tried this with the TV app on their AppleTVs. It was supposed to pull all your subscriptions into one interface, searchable, with tracking and watchlists and all that good stuff. One unified app to all your content. Then Netflix said they weren't going to play ball,…

I find that it's actually more annoying than it is useful

Like most of Apple's software, it's extraordinarily annoying. It may or may not surface what you searched for, it may or may not deep link into it, it may or may not be entirely wrong. Just a huge waste of time, "free" is too expensive.

Re: Which streaming service was that on again?

#29

If only there was dozens of services for this exact issue. this took me less than a few minutes with classic non-LLM search: https://imdb.com https://www.justwatch.com/ https://streamsearchup.com/ https://www.wheretowatch.stream/ https://streamfinder.co/ https://findmystreams.com/ https://lookupvod.com/en

Have you used any of these? Most of them are awful and not useful at all. JustWatch is alright but is succumbing to enshittification.

Re: Which streaming service was that on again?

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You remember incorrectly. The first real commercial on-demand streaming service to gain traction was Netflix, and it exploded in popularity precisely because it did have "almost everything". One reasonable price, practically everything worth watching. That was the original promise.

It really wasn't. Early streaming (like 2012-ish, after cord-cutting was possible but before it was mainstream) had Netflix and Hulu as the two major services, and so anything that was on streaming was on one of those two. But lots and lots of stuff just wasn't on streaming at all. If you subscribed to Netflix back then, you probably subscribed to both the streaming and the disc-mailing plan, because there were enoug…

> there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps.

That's true today, Netflix just misses those gaps outright now.

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