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.
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.
they hyped up X-Men 97 for months and then didn’t bring it to my region. i don’t even know how there would be copyright issues since it’s an original. they just want me to stop paying and start sailing.
but it’s THEIR SHOW i don’t get what copyright problems they would have… i understand when they have licensed shows from other companies, syndication etc but why not release original shows everywhere? Netflix does it.
Honestly this is a nice feature for some kinds of shows. Sometimes I don’t want to watch a show from the beginning in order for certain kinds of shows. The only problem is this feature is coming as streaming services are fracturing and becoming less and less usable.
Right, give me Seinfeld shows on random. TNG. Fucking early seasons of Family Guy. Community to an extent. So many sitcoms that you can really watch a random episode and be good to go. Sometimes it’s midnight and you’re too drunk to go to bed and don’t want to think about what you’re going to watch.
If they do it like Paramount I’m all for it. I like just throwing on the Star Trek channel rather than deciding what episode of which series I want to watch. That’s part of why I get so much use out of Plex’s Live TV channels. Only difference is paramount doesn’t have ads on their channels
I have playlists set up in Plex that I use like a TV channel. One’s all [adult swim] cartoons, another is old sci fi, another is just documentaries. Best part is no commercials.
Live TV is handy for sports, but sort of out of date for the modern habit of binge streaming a series.
I don’t really want to watch TV starting from the middle of an episode in the middle of a series. I’d much rather just jump to where I was in my Dropout queue and start watching whatever show is next in the list.
Tbh, I have trouble binge watching most shows. I can’t watch more than 2 or 3 of the same show at a time. Idk why I have trouble with it more than others. After, I usually have to switch to a different show, or a different activity, like video games.
Not everyone wants to binge a show from start to finish
For example, I really enjoyed the episodes of the office that I have watched. It was many years ago and it was only random episodes I caught while airing on TV.
Went to Netflix to watch at started on episode 1. From what I hear season 1 isn’t the greatest. I got through a couple episodes and then thought to myself, this is going to take so many nights of watching to watch them all in order. Never watched another again.
Now if I could turn on the television and say S6EP7 was playing I’d probably enjoy watching it. Might even watch the next episode too.
With classic TV you also get the feeling that you’re watching the show with others.
Channel 1 is having a Harry Potter bingeathon. I catch it on episode 3 and continue to watch it. I’ve seen them all multiple times so I don’t really care where I start. But it’s nice knowing others are having a HP bingeathon with me on a Saturday afternoon. If I was sitting there with my plex server, I could play any HP. But I’m never going to put it on and if I did it would just be me watching the show.
Not everyone wants to binge a show from start to finish
Then don’t.
Went to Netflix to watch at started on episode 1. From what I hear season 1 isn’t the greatest. I got through a couple episodes and then thought to myself, this is going to take so many nights of watching to watch them all in order. Never watched another again.
Here’s a list of some of the most popular episodes of the office. I’d probably just pick one of the early seasons and go from there.
Now if I could turn on the television and say S6EP7 was playing I’d probably enjoy watching it.
Sure. But you can just watch that one straight out. Why simply hope that’s the one Hulu decides to stream at a given moment?
Channel 1 is having a Harry Potter bingeathon. I catch it on episode 3 and continue to watch it.
There’s definitely an appeal to rediscovering old classic movies. But in my experience, the amount of crap out there far outweighs the amount of gold. And the purpose of running channels isn’t to give you a steady diet of quality show. Its to run what’s cheapest to run at any given moment.
You only start seeing Harry Potter on the Daytime Movie Channel when its completely fallen off people’s radars and the rights are cheaper to acquire.
You’re far less likely to see Channel 1 having a Harry Potter bingeathon than you are to see them showing Gremlins or Home Alone, because these series are far cheaper to fill non-prime air time with.
Some people just like to be able to click on one button and have someone or something else decide for you. In my country linear TV is at least for public service still more popular than the great (completely free, open, and mostly DRM free) streaming service.
I personally don’t like linear television (or something like this) but I can see why some would.
People that like it won’t suddenly decide otherwise just because you pointed out that streaming is technically better.
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.
Not being funny, I actually do love linear programming. I miss the days when I’d just turn on the TV and there’s be a random episode of the Simpsons or King of the Hill, or something with stupidly many episode like one of the thousand Law & Orders.
Picking something to watch from the beginning is a chore, and now I feel invested if I don’t end up being in the mood. Stuff that’s just “already playing” is something I dreamed of recreating when I started (not)pirating everything. "It started 5 minute ago but this is a good episode " was how I grew up watching TV (and even movies).
I think my favorite part is the fact that everybody (with the exception of telecasts) is seeing the same thing at the same time, so it was more of a social event like sports. It was so great back then.
You can do this with Plex, which I find occasionally nice
but the enshittification…
I know, I know, I’m just relating to a comment. It’s also a feature on other sites
Personally I’d like a “live” TV with 1-episode DVR. As in, I can tune in to a random whatever and if I find it actually interesting I can hop back to the start of the episode and enjoy without having to completely miss the before bits.
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.
we need to change them, not get rid of them. i think completely getting rid of IP laws would benefit big corpos like Disney. they would do to any small creator what Amazon does to small shops. they already try to do it as much as possible, but they’d be much more free to crush everyone else smaller than them.
how would they crush smaller frontends for content and smaller streaming services if they both have the same content and those smaller front ends are capable of giving me, as it stands, a much better ad free financially free faster lighter weight more customizable product experience?
are you saying if Disney and I have the same script in our hands and we’re both free to do whatever we want with it, that I have a better chance of making money off of it than they are?
and yes, they would totally crush streaming services too. do you have any idea how expensive it is to make a video based service?
Well ideally you’d fund the development of the product and make profit off of it before launch if you really needed to, either through crowdfunding campaigns, or joining a monthly donation that puts out movies every however many years that are free for all. If a studio or artist puts out bad shit, or puts out something that already existed but just in a chopped up form, people would probably just stop paying that studio or that artist since their credibility would plummet. You could even just rig up a new advertisement scheme as a way to pay creators, which I assume companies would do since they’ve done shit like that with YouTube.
I also don’t understand your hypothetical here. If Disney puts out a new marvel movie, why the fuck would you make another (presumably) marvel movie that has the exact same script? Likewise, why would Disney copy the script of a fan movie when they could just pay pennies to some put upon Hollywood writer for a script? It’s not like good scripts for movies are really in short supply, and most problems with movies are like that, they come down to shitty executive decisions. Disney’s probably not gonna “release” a chopped up version of your movie that they made for pennies. How would they even monetize that in a post IP world? Why wouldn’t people just watch yours instead, if they did that, since they’re probably accessible through the same avenues in a post IP world? How would Disney not lose all credibility as a company, as a content producer, as a creator of art?
In any case, if Disney wanted to copy your short film pretty much beat for beat, they could just do that and get away with it pretty much whole hog right now. What are you gonna do, sue Disney? How would you prove that they copied you? Disney’s not stupid enough to just copy and paste the same script, much like you shouldn’t be, they’d change the words, change the aesthetic, etc, making it much harder to prove in a court. And there’s not really a way to solve that problem with more bureaucracy, unless you’re totally changing the economic structure, which I’d also be onboard with.
This isn’t even getting into how IP works for pharmaceuticals or more important shit. A lot of people died from COVID in African countries because Bill Gates decided to poop his pants over IP law, plenty of people constantly cite the evergreening of insulin.
I dunno, somehow Disney’s brand didn’t plummet after mickey mouse went public domain, and I’m sure they’re gonna continue making more mickey shit in the future.
I also don’t know how much it costs to put up a streaming service, but I do know that straight up right now I can watch anime for free with no ads and a better end user experience than any of the mainline streaming services. I can also do that to a lesser degree with basically everything except pro wrestling and other live sports content, because nobody gives a shit about those apparently. Except for AAA and CMLL and lots of foreign promotions which are free on YouTube for some reason.
Add comment