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'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.
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’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.
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