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Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

theguardian.com

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Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#491

Post by LMYahooTFY »

ryandrake wrote: post #153

Piracy offers: 1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies. 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. 3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations. 4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth. I d…

Let's not forget:

No advertising.

I think, particularly now after having the luxury of ad blockers for so long, that many of us are extremely triggered by advertisements and see them more nakedly as the awful propaganda they are.

Disrupting a cinematic experience with garbage propaganda ruins it. It's an insult to the creators, and none of us should tolerate it.

I'm glad streaming services adopted a better model, but then they reverted back as they increased prices because the money is too good and people put up with it.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#492

Post by cgriswald »

School-Cotton wrote: post #432
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly annoying is when original language subtitles aren’t available in your region for some reason, even when the audio track of the same language is . Really puts a damper on using foreign media for immersive language learning purposes.

One of the streaming services (I forget if it was Netflix or Amazon) had the original German audio track for Deutschland 83, as well as German subtitles, but the German subtitles were machine-translated from the English subtitles. Maddening!

Max has an anime and we stopped watching because even though English subtitles and English dubbed audio was available the original Japanese audio was always strangely delayed by days or weeks and the only way to tell it had been added was to check manually.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#493

Post by zerocrates »

cgriswald wrote: post #492
School-Cotton wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the streaming services (I forget if it was Netflix or Amazon) had the original German audio track for Deutschland 83, as well as German subtitles, but the German subtitles were machine-translated from the English subtitles. Maddening!

Max has an anime and we stopped watching because even though English subtitles and English dubbed audio was available the original Japanese audio was always strangely delayed by days or weeks and the only way to tell it had been added was to check manually.

Lazarus?

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#494

Post by zerocrates »

qrios wrote: post #481
tclancy wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I have recently watched The Lives of Others? (Which everyone in the US should.)

‘The Lives of Others’ is an outstanding film. However, it is a reappraisal of East German history and was made seven years after the collapse (the director grew up in West Germany and Western Europe). US-America has looked at the subject of surveillance of its own population and its own (possible) collapse many times and often in a timely manner. "The Conversation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation "Ene…

The collapse being the collapse of the DDR? The Lives of Others must have been made way further beyond that than 7 years. Closer to 20, I'd figure.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#495

Post by caconym_ »

ryandrake wrote: post #153

Piracy offers: 1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies. 2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release. 3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations. 4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth. I d…

I'm sure somebody else has mentioned this, but if you're willing to buy physical media, it's not difficult to rip even 4K HDR blu-rays yourself and stream from a self hosted platform like Jellyfin.

I'm able to find most of what I want to watch on physical media in either HD or 4K, with the exception of more obscure anime. Some TV shows can be expensive to pick up and more laborious to rip, though.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#496

Post by aceazzameen »

janalsncm wrote: post #363
cptnntsoobv wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the saying at Netflix used to go back in the day: we need to become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix

If the production quality of Netflix was close to HBO it would be nice. HBO has some absolute classics: The Wire, The Sopranos, GoT, White Lotus, The Last of Us, Alaskan Killer Bigfoot. Almost all bangers.

I'd argue Netflix productions started out almost as great as HBO, but quickly took a dive when they started pushing quantity over quality. Now finding a quality Netflix production is about once a year. Maybe that's the same rate as it use to be?

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#497

Post by weberer »

kenjackson wrote: post #455
hbn wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget censorship-free I swore off streaming services when they started pulling episodes of comedy shows and editing out scenes because they were worried someone might be offended

That seems like a bad reason to swear off streaming services. Do you not shop at stores because they don’t carry offensive clothing?

That's a really awkward analogy. A better one would be: Would you buy an album with all the curse words bleeped out? A lot of people would, but others would prefer the uncensored version.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#498

Post by arrowsmith »

zerocrates wrote: post #494
qrios wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘The Lives of Others’ is an outstanding film. However, it is a reappraisal of East German history and was made seven years after the collapse (the director grew up in West Germany and Western Europe). US-America has looked at the subject of surveillance of its own population and its own (possible) collapse many times and often in a timely manner. "The Conversation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation "Ene…

The collapse being the collapse of the DDR? The Lives of Others must have been made way further beyond that than 7 years. Closer to 20, I'd figure.

TLOO came out in 2006, 16 years after the DDR collapsed.

I wondered if GP was thinking of another movie so I asked ChatGPT, which told me: "The German film you’re thinking of is "Good Bye, Lenin!" — released in 2003, exactly seven years after the formal end of the DDR in 1990." (My emphasis.)

So much for GPT-5.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#499

Post by paczki »

Last night I rented the movie Sinners off of Google play and was beyond incredibly annoyed that the playback was 720p the entire time in chrome and Firefox, on both Linux and windows. I honestly feel like I got ripped off, and I got that 10 dollar Google gift card for free.

Re: Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy

#500

Post by hibikir »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #387
godelski wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piracy also offers: 0. Ability to watch offline! 1. Ability to fix subtitle issues with minimal tweeks like change size or moving location. 1.2 Ability to get subtitles if they aren't offered (or offered in your language) 2. Ability to normalize audio. 3. Ability to buffer videos when on a poor connection. 4. Ability to create collections, organize, and track your movie as you wish 5. Arbitrary number of user account…

Subtitles are often a very dumb failure point, especially when English subtitles aren't available in half the world for basically no reason.

And don't miss the situations where the subtitles are baked into the stream: HBO Max is very fond of just not letting you remove subtitles at all for at least a few non-english series.
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