I’ve kinda wished services would do something a bit like this for a while:
One channel for new stuff, based on your recommendations—just gives you a load of random tastes of shows without you actively picking through things
One for stuff you rewatch. For example, if you’ve watched always sunny or peep show through a couple of times, put random episodes on this channel for when you just want something in the background
This sounds like a bit of a slippery slope fallacy, if you’re implying that a steaming service using a recommendation algorithm obviously concludes with sinister personalised AI brainwashing injected into my watching, I think you maybe should watch less black mirror.
If you didn’t mean that, we’ve been using AI in film and TV for ages now, the latest batch of Star wars films made extensive use of it. Hell, the huge battles in lord of the rings used a rudimentary AI system for governing all the entities in it.
I’m just working my way to asking if you’d watch personalized AI TV bruh, not purposely attempting a fallacy. I’d give it a look, maybe once or twice. Just to see 😂
For the rewatch, on Plex you can build playlists and shuffle them. I do this for my kids, one wants Bluey and the other wants Peppa pig. I let the random gods decide what comes on next.
There was a chrome extension a few years ago called ottoplay that did something like this, would take your Netflix Hulu and YouTube accounts and set up channels like comedy movies and shit like that, would play random episode non stop.
Minus ad breaks, I missed this aspect of content consumption. Choosing to watch a random episode of a random show just doesn’t happen and I missed being able to just “see what’s on”. I spent a fair amount of time setting up random “channels” I can tune into that play random episodes from tv shows on my media server and it’s great.
A lot of newer shows cannot be watched randomly though because the episodes actually build upon each other.
If you take older shows like TNG or X files: you could easily jump back in after missing half a season. The episodes were written to be mostly self-contained, because missing an episode or two because of life was very very common. Season finales were often a major exception, and were therefore also majority advertised so people knew to plan around them.
If you write a show for streaming, however, there is no concept of “missing an episode”. So the writers are freed from that constraint, and subsequently write shows that are only meant to be watched in their entirety, in order.
Interesting to see it as being freed from a constraint rather than a crutch that viewers can be relied upon to watch all episodes. IMO writing satisfying one episode arc that also makes up part of a wider arc is much more difficult, and many shows now really have just a single arc that only gets good in the last third, making it essentially a 6-8 hour movie rather than an episodic show.
Yeah, you can definitely see a trend towards more HBO style shows as streaming took off.
I remember watching an episode of The Wire, and somebody else watched it with me and didn’t like it because they didn’t know what was going on and the story wasn’t resolved in an hour. I’m like 10 episodes in, and this ain’t Columbo.
I'm old enough to remember the promise that cable TV was paid so you wouldn't have commercials...it lasted what, 6 months? The channels without commercials cost extra...le sigh
The predictable backstop of subscription plus the nearly limitless potential upside of ad sales is just too tempting in the long run for media companies. They get to have their cake and eat it too. Spotify, Amazon, Netflix and have all eventually given in, despite insisting they never would. Shareholder owned media companies will always gravitate to this model. It’s the only way to maximize quarterly revenue growth.
Yep. It was pretty clear streaming services were always going to end up the same way from the start. Even YouTube has, although that was harder to predict when it was mostly 30s cat videos.
I’m already thinking about it. I can’t watch new content outside the service, so if I’m torrenting for long term storage regardless, why am I paying in the first place?
The most frustrating thing about their interface is that if you’ve already watched an episode of something, then try to watch it again, it’ll immediately minimize it to start the “next episode” countdown.
It’s been ongoing.
And Disney+ is so crowded with garbage now that they’ve integrated Hulu’s content into it.
I always have trouble watching Disney streams. Bad quality, buffering, slow loading. I usually just pirate the show and switch to Plex because apparently I can run a better streaming service than Disney.
only reason I still have disney+ is because my cousin used to borrow it from me. then I stopped paying for it and he was too lazy to make his own account to he just started paying mine. I’ve had free disney+ for year and a half now
I’ve dropped all streaming services, well save for my YouTube Music/Premium subscription I got grandfathered into when Google Play Music was brutally murdered.
I image it started life as JPEG, and then lost pixels every time it was re-uploaded. At some point, it was either converted into a WEBP file and uploaded to Lemmy, or Lemmy converted it into one. Either way, it always uses about 70% compression for WEBP files, so you end up with already compressed file getting compressed again.
I just tested uploading a WEBP file to Lemmy, and the picts-rs backend made it a) bigger and b) worse.
Except WEBP, unlike (most versions of) JPEG, can be compressed without quality loss. This is probably a mix of reuploading a JPEG and a bad encoding by Lemmy’s side. It should be fixed if you uploaded an already webp encoded image, so lemmy doesn’t try to reformat it, but for a sequels meme it’s not worth the time
Disney+ has a problem where they are very strong but in very specific genres. I go for the Marvel and Star Wars stuff, but am not interested in kids or teens stuff. Depending on the details, this could make it nicer by filtering out the stuff I will never be interested in
Spoiler alert, but they aren’t gonna slash their prices so you only pay for what you want. They are gonna bill you yhe same, take away all your options, and then charge you another $4 a month for Marvel, and another $5 for Star Wars.
Not enough to lose money overall. People are sleepwalking through life. We cannot get a general strike over healthcare, let alone a tiny boycott over prices.
Yeah, i imagine it’s gonna be two tv packages, plus a “Princess” package that has all the classic Disney and Pixar animation movies, so the end result is that people just doubled what they pay for Disney+
I go there to watch simpsons and futurama and king of the hill and all that crap that I have seen like 10 times (for simpsons and futurama not enough) but it still makes me giggle when I’m high
I use it for Marvel and Star Wars too (especially with the somewhat renewed faith in live action offerings thanks to Andor),but also watch shows like Dave, The Bear, Extraordinary, Abbot Elementary, The Orville etc on Disney+. This is in the UK. I believe some of those show on Hulu where that service exists.
Yeah, been that way for a while. I assume either this tweet is old as fuck, or they’re adding more paid for ones. Or some regions don’t have it that way yet.
The discoverability on D+ is awful as well. There’s loads of older stuff and all it wants to show me is shitty “reality” TV I couldn’t give a fuck about, and have never watched. I’m only on it now because the wife is halfway through Buffy and can’t remember where to find it again if I torrented it and I can’t be arsed with the aggro.
its so tiresome to have all these services constantly made worse. these days it feels whenever a new thing comes out, it has about two or three years before it’s run into the ground in pursuit of the almighty dollar.
and this kind of thing is also happening to movies/tv shows/video game franchises. it feels like no matter how good it starts, you only get (at most) 2 or 3 sequels before the executives get their hands on it and run it into the ground. sure there are exceptions to this, but they are few and far between. and its becoming even more common for shows/video games to simply disappear if the parent company decides to remove them from online stores/streaming platforms.
all around, it just feels like things are becoming less and less permanent
You’re describing capitalism. That’s literally what happens to everything when capitalism is unchecked.
“Hey, we’re getting pretty good at producing food. Let’s put corn syrup in everything and make cheap food addictive.”
“Hey, we just noticed that frightened people buy more guns. Let’s make sure criminals can always buy guns so that we are arming everyone!”
“Land is the one thing they aren’t making more of. Let’s drive prices up while interest rates are low so that people have to spend all of their income on rent or die in the streets!”
When profits are the only motivation, then products and services will only get so good before the investor class starts looking for ways to take advantage of leverage instead of innovation. Unregulated markets create opportunities for unbalanced relationships between producers and consumers, and it is always built on the lie that you can influence the markets by “voting with your dollars,” as though enshittification is what we want, what we deserve.
Telecom companies existed before the internet and have made every effort their television fiefdoms would have the right to own it as well.
Then again the only bastion of defense against this has been a parade of old ass people who don’t own computers and were handed a smartphone 15 years ago but only want campaign donations in exchange for not understanding the problem.
So it really wasn’t much effort at all to turn the internet into TV 2.0.
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