It’s on Plex. It’s all on Plex. (Or Jellyfin, if you prefer.)
Piracy in the 90s and early aughts mostly didn’t solve for price so much as for distribution and availability.
Which streaming service was that on again?
61–70 of 94 posts
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#62> The original promise of streaming was simple. Everything would be available whenever you wanted it. You could sit down in the evening and binge an entire season without waiting a week for the next episode. That's not how I remember it. Streaming services never had everything . The promise was: there would be something you would enjoy. There are two reasons why this isn't working for us: 1. They've cut costs and ove…
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.
What? It famously didn't on the streaming side. It had everything on DVD. For years I kept both parts of Netflix because a lot of popular shows—newer ones especially—weren't on it. So I could get DVDs of past seasons. Or go to Hulu for newer episodes.
Hulu was created at the same time, and launched in the same year as Netflix's streaming service, specifically to compete with less-convenient pirated streams of current-run TV with a free-the-next-day-with-ads alternative. And that stuff was never on Netflix at the same time.
High-profile not-on-Netflix-streaming-for-first-run things from the 2007-2014 time frame: The Office, Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, and honestly basically everything else broadcast and cable made during "Peak TV." It was big news and considered a big bet when Netflix debuted their own high-budget first-run content with House of Cards, because of how weird it was to see Netflix competing in the brand-new show space.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#63If 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…" :-(
iOS-only, but Callsheet (https://callsheetapp.com>) is basically "What if the IMDB app didn't suck?" It uses TMDB as the data source. I love the interface, and it has JustWatch info built-in; I use it as my quick access link, so I now only use it to find where things are.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#64> Cross-platform search should be standard by now. A shared watchlist across services would help
I have a Hisense TV with Roku interface. I was always able to search a movie and it'll tell me ways to watch. Being a data engineer, I sometimes wonder how that data is collected and aggregated.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#65Earlier 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.
Netflix had “everything” because it was the first (commercially successful) mover on streaming, and as a result it was pretty much the only game in town for a long time. Every other producer HAD to be on Netflix if they wanted to reach the streaming audiences. It was only after their success did all the other producers feel comfortable that this was the future, started building their own apps, and then had to wait fo…
There were so many expensive TV shows being made that it simply wasn't sustainable.
We're actually back to normal. TV before streaming was A LOT of reruns, trashy talkshows/reality TV, soaps and quiz shows.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#66Earlier 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…
Having everything was part of the marketing. It was just a complete lie. Everyone had that moment with Netflix where they realized every movie is in every category and there isn't nearly as much on there as it seems.
I remember ads that exaggerated things that suck about rental stores. One of them was about all the cool movies being thrown out and replaced with 30 copies of Pony Adventure 4. They never explicitly stated that Netflix will always have the solution to those problems forever, but they implied it as hard as they legally could.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#67> The original promise of streaming was simple. Everything would be available whenever you wanted it. You could sit down in the evening and binge an entire season without waiting a week for the next episode. That's not how I remember it. Streaming services never had everything . The promise was: there would be something you would enjoy. There are two reasons why this isn't working for us: 1. They've cut costs and ove…
> 2. We've started expecting "must-see" shows and movies. You want to watch The Pitt, and then are mad that you need to get HBO or whatever and can't just watch it on Netflix. Perhaps you could browse Netflix and find something you'd like, but you have your heart set on a specific show.
Obviously (1) is a failing of the streaming providers, but I think (2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good.
#2 is because streaming companies made a promise that they couldn’t live up to — namely, that subscribing to their service would essentially be tv on demand and we could watch the best tv had to offer without the limited scheduling of over-the-air broadcasting. Well, it turns out that one of the great benefits of network broadcasting was that everyone could watch the same show because everyone had access to the broadcast. The streaming companies are expecting subscribers to watch what’s on their service just because it’s on their service, which is exactly what regular broadcast tv had forced everyone to do. Streaming offers the option to watch anytime but not the option to watch anything, even thought that was in fact part of the original promise.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#68This is what URIs were for. It's too bad we don't have nice things like book://9781250781253 or movie://le%20samourai or song:// or livesports://
There is an ISBN URN namespace, but I don't know whether anyone maps it to anything. https://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-formal/isbn
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
What subtitles does it have? Any you want, regardless of where you are, where your residency is or your citizen status.
And the subtitles themselves will be beautifully authored making full use of features like using color coding and positions to show who's talking. Sometimes you'll even get Area 51 technology where text appearing on signs will be edited to appear translated using only subtitles.
Yeah this is truly crazy subtitle tech and it always blows my mind how they make it so seamless.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#70- i am a huge movie buff myself
- my imdb watchlist with completed items runs more than 1000 movies long
- my incomplete is another 1000+ movies
- i have never used a single streaming service in my life yet
- torrented every single one of them
- if a movie is spectacular, i ll watch it at the theatre