Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate | What should I watch? is now a much easier question than How do I watch it?
Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate | What should I watch? is now a much easier question than How do I watch it?
What should I watch? is now a much easier question than How do I watch it?
Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate | What should I watch? is now a much easier question than How do I watch it?::<em>What should I watch? </em>is now a much easier question than <em>How do I watch it?</em>
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44To bypass the paywall: https://archive.ph/GO7mu
26Jellyfin is a great alternative system. You just have to get the shows and movies somewhere which also isn't that hard cough cough
26Ne'er should one relinquish control of thine own vessel. Back to the seas shall we voyage mateys!
Also, 12ft.io
24Friendly reminder that PLEX is a great, free service, you just have to put in the effort to build up a media collection. High capacity HDDs are very cheap now, so storing a large media collection isn't particularly expensive.
They also offer a lifetime "Plex pass" which adds some neat, but non-essential features, like auto-skipping intros and credits sequences for instance. It's not necessary, but it's a nice way to show support for what they do.
17The amount of media we have instant access to has reached a level that I find intimidating rather than inviting. Consuming media is becoming more of a chore than a pleasure. Dividing the available media into more services is a plus for me, if I am honest.
I have access to a streaming service, and if they don't have anything I'm interested in, I just walk away and read a book, play a game, put on some music, go outside, or do my chores.
The days when I thought there were things I "should" watch/read/play/listen to are long gone. Not being driven by what is "the thing to do" makes life so much better.
Not having much choice also makes life easier. There were times when I spent more time clicking around in the flood of what I could consume than I did choosing and enjoying. Now, if I can't decide in less than 5 minutes, I take it as a sign that I should do something else.
17The basic problem with media is that copyright creates a monopoly for 100 years or so depending on various factors. This means that unless you're into Arthur Conan Doyle or whatever, the media landscape is fundamentally monopolistic.
16Personally I've had enough with the constant fragmentation of every streaming IP into just an on demand cable TV package but even more expensive, so as soon as find the right "TV Guide but for on demand streaming programs" to replace the recommendation algorithms, I'm gonna cancel all my subscriptions and exclusively sail the digital seas.
15piracy is way more convinient, especially with apps like CloudStream.
Or transmission/qbittorrent + rss + jellyfin + findroid for a self hosted alternative.11Well, how? I go to my mighty little website and they give it to me for free...
10Most evenings, I find myself stuck in this phase, during which time I am likely to cycle through something resembling the five stages of grief. There’s Denial (I swear I had a Paramount+ account); Anger (I cannot believe I have to pay for Paramount+); Bargaining (I promise I will cancel my subscription after the one-week Paramount+ trial period ends); Depression (I cannot believe I didn’t remember to cancel Paramount+ after the trial period ended); and Acceptance (Let’s just head to Netflix and watch Suits).
Do people not realize you can cancel your subscription immediately after registering. The cancelation just stops the automatic monthly renewal. No one wants to deal with the hassle of pro rating and refunding partial used monthly subscriptions, so cancelling renewal is all it does.
9I’m sorry, but I really don’t get it… the bigger question is and always has been where can I watch it.
It was a bit easier during the beginning of the streaming era, but never that easy, especially in Europe…
I need a stupid app (JustWatch) to tell me where I can watch a movie or show… so how is it easy to watch? It’s also not easy if I need 4+ streaming services…
8Permanently Deleted
8It's always been, what should i watch. There just used to be the caveat of how.
7Just let me have my Stremio, and I'm a content man
7After just a few times of trying to watch something and not knowing which or if it was on any of my services I went straight back to the places I know will have exactly what I'm looking for in a couple clicks. Things have only gotten worse since then with the explosion of the number of streaming services.
5“What should Ie watch?” is the question not because the quality of the offerings is so good, but because generally the offerings are absolute crap. Free current B movies are a lucky find, the rest is all old C and D list crap. You can’t even find highly regarded classics like Schindler’s List or Shawshank Redemption for free most of the time.
It’s unbundling all the way down. Charge for the service, charge for the quality of service (# of devices, 4k or not), then charge for the better content.
4I still use my DVD/Blu-ray by mail subscription from Netflix. Practically everything was available that way. I will be canceling Netflix for a while after that goes away at the end if the month. I plan to just rotate through which services I subscribe to.
4Personally, that's one of the reasons why I haven't bothered to watch a TV series for almost a decade now. Between this, the constant crackdown on piracy, the outrageous prices for original media, and the constant moral issues from popular culture icons and media CEOs, I'd rather sleep in my free time
4It’s like the author never used the search function on a set top box. Most will allow you to add a program to a master queue and then will show you what channel(s) the program is on when you want to watch it. And unlike cable, you don’t have to call to add the channel when you don’t have it, or to cancel when you no longer want it.
3"what do I want to watch" is stupid hard, cmon. I spend most of my time watching the roku screen saver.
How? If it's not on my plex it's probably on a friends.
I'm tired of this expensive fragmented bullshit.3Nebula.
3Roku has a great voice search which works across all of the installed apps. I can just ask it for a movie, and it tells me which services have it.
2I've heard a lot about setting up a Plex or a Jellyfin server locally, but from what I can tell they are just media storage platforms and in order to watch anything you would have to add your own content. In this age of digital content, it is very unlikely for a simpleton like me to go out and purchase hundreds of movie disks separately and manually load them into my CD drive to even have a fraction of the catalogue these streaming services combined provide. Also torrenting really isn't a viable option for me as I personally use a free tier Proton VPN which doesn't allow P2P, and even if I did get a proper one, I would still be limited to availability of seeds for movies I want to watch, which may or may not exist depending on the popularity of the said movie. I currently use a niche streaming site to watch my movies without any issues. Are self hosted plex/jellyfin servers really for a person like me?
2This was a Very inevitable situation due to the fragmentation of Programs that are scattered across multiple Networks.
If only there was a solution to this problem of greed….
1I just subscribe to everything. Even a few niche services like britbox.
After taking into account credit card kickbacks, discounts from T-Mobile, and discounts from annual plans, I pay about 1/3 less than I did for cable with all the movie stations and DVR service back in the early aughts. And I'm even counting adding basic cable to my Internet (I use an app to stream that so no extra box). And I'm not even accounting for 20 years of inflation, with that it's about a 60% reduction.
So I pay 60% less after inflation for almost every movie and TV show ever made commercial free on demand on any device I own anywhere in the world (some programming changes apply) and live news and sports with the cable app (I don't think I've tried the cable app overseas though).
It used to be appointment TV with non-premium stations having 30-35% commercial time. Even when TiVo came out you had to buy it and pay a sub, and when cable started offering DVR you paid for a more expensive box rental on top of paying monthly for the ability to DVR, double-dipping fuckers.
I really don't understand complaints about streaming. Compared to what it's replacing it's an amazing upgrade in price, quality, and convenience. When do you ever get that? How hard is it to figure out what service something is on? Most boxes have a universial search and if your using a mobile device Google is right there. Yeah prices get higher on occasion, but inflation is a thing and now that content producers see the profit in streaming they're putting money into new content, which makes me think of another thing: content produced for streaming is vastly superior, even on streaming services from the old major networks. Stuff that wouldn't have gotten by the advertisers, let alone the censors for commercial broadcast, and no editing for time. A particular episode needs an extra couple/several minutes to be told correctly, no big deal.
As someone who loves the silver screen, and the small screen, for art and entertainment that can't be called art with a straight face, I love streaming. I can't understand how anyone who paid for cable/satellite in the past couldn't.
Sorry for the ramble, can't be bothered to edit for clarity or readability.
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