The problem is those companies are profitmaxxing, not servicemaxxing. Of course they will penny-pinch until they lost any and all utility. As long as you give them money anyway, they have no reason to change.
Which streaming service was that on again?
81–90 of 94 posts
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#82What the courts did to the studios back in the '40s should be done today. Your company can either commission/produce original content OR you can be a distributor OR exhibitor. Only one.
Ok. Now two companies with similar board members enter in to an exclusive licensing deal.
then ban all kinds of exclusive deals, licensing and buyer/seller agreements. its the most direct anti competitive action you can take but its legal for some reason.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#83Earlier 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…
Depends in which country you live. Netflix was the only thing in many places outside the US for a long time.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#84While it shouldn’t be necessary to resort to third party services to resolve these issues, it’s worth noting that JustWatch will tell you where a movie can be found and Letterboxd (among others) will give you a somewhat more clunky unified watchlist.
If you put your unified watchlist on JustWatch, they will even notify you when something you want to watch becomes available.
So will Reelgood which I migrated to because JustWatch started feeling annoyingly advertising filled and it’s Apple TV App was just broken.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#85> 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,…
Netflix is the only major service that doesn’t seem to play well, but services with sub-services (especially Amazon) don’t take into account your subscriptions when announcing what they carry and others (like Hulu) advertise stuff you can’t view at all.
The idea is excellent, individual provider’s implementations often suck, but since the Netflix app is so very terrible, they could really use full Apple TV integration.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Most of those issues are with individual streaming providers messing up their implementations of the announcement apps,
or showing how terrible their own catalog is (e.g. Hulu wanting to play the Spanish version of the Mentalist) but there is definitely room for improvement- it should remember properly which provider you watched a series instead of constantly reverting to what it thinks is best which is based on the bad data from the other apps.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#87If 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
Yeah sure. My point is that I have to leave the streaming apps and use third-party services in the first place. If finding where to watch something requires another app or website, I’d argue the ecosystem itself has a UX problem
Apple TV comes the closest, if you ignore the Netflix sized hole.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#88If 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…" :-(
I moved to Reelgood.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you used any of these? Most of them are awful and not useful at all. JustWatch is alright but is succumbing to enshittification.
I'm going to guess there's basically one real one and the rest are scraping it to present with more ads.
Based on comparisons at least JustWatch and ReelGood don’t share a database.
Re: Which streaming service was that on again?
#90While it shouldn’t be necessary to resort to third party services to resolve these issues, it’s worth noting that JustWatch will tell you where a movie can be found and Letterboxd (among others) will give you a somewhat more clunky unified watchlist.
As far as "third party service shouldn't be necessary", is it that different from getting the TV Guide in the 80s or 90s to find out when a show was going to be on TV?
The difference is people likely aren’t subscribed to every streaming service, so looking up what service a movie is on it a little like a slot machine, where you spin the wheel and hope it lands on a service you have.
You could say that’s not dissimilar to a person having basic cable, while the TV Guide also shows all the premium channels, but in this still feels different.
In a way it’s what people asked for, but not really. With cable, people were bothered by paying a high price when they only watched a few stations. They wanted the ability to pick and choose for a lower price. Now we can pick and choose, but there is too much overlap in content, so it ends up being more expensive to get it all. It’s not like there is a service for sitcoms, another one for drama, sports, music, etc. They are all trying to do a little bit of everything. This isn’t what people actually wanted.