This has already happened in my circles..

People who had cut the cord but all but walked away from casual piracy and signed up for Netflix and HBO (and probably Prime Video because they had Amazon Prime already) are openly talking about the fact they're definitely not signing up for more streaming services, and are seeking out torrenting again for the stuff that's being pulled from Netflix (especially Disney shows).

I feel like there's a business opportunity for a meta-service that automatically manages monthly subscriptions for you on different services. You queue up a catalog of shows you want to watch, and it creates an optimized schedule for you and helps sign up for the individual streaming service on a given month in order to watch the show you want.

As long as you don't care about the zeitgeist, this would probably be fine for a lot of people.

Look, I want a convenient way to watch movies. I would even be ready to pay more than I do right now to Netflix to have a library of ALL the movies I want to watch.

1 library, not 10, especially if they may or may not contain the movie I want to see.

My honeymoon period with Netflix and co is over.

- I feel that their original content has dried out : there is even more of it, but it rarely interest me these days and I feel like the quality has dropped in favor of quantity.

- Let's say I want to watch Blade Runner. I want the "final cut" (IMO the best version, it is the director's cut, unlike the "director's cut" which isn't one in this case). Well, I have just checked, this movie is not on Netflix. If it was, I would not have the choice of the cut. I would not be able to e.g. listen to the team commentary either. That's the first movie that sprung to my mind, but that's a good example of my experience with Netflix.

A rolling library of content like what Netflix and co have is not what I want. At all. I want an ever growing one.

I like to be able to get my content "legitimely" (quotes because if you watch old movies, chances are you are not paying the artists but the mega corporation who bought the rights to it but that's OT), and I am not looking for solutions to "cheat the system". However, right now torrenting sites are becoming again the most efficient (and in some cases only) solution to access the content I would like to watch.

Pick one, they’ve had all the movies / TV shows I wanted to watch, which are not all mainstream.

If there’s an exception and there’s something you don’t find it there - well, do you, but I really don’t understand how piracy is the default answer to convenience with people claiming they have the willingness to pay.

Someone else commented about the local video store - also an option, if not something I’d do myself (does redbox count?)

I wonder why that is, and I'm assuming it is because of some cumbersome contractual relations.

On a DVD I'm pretty certain I could have gotten English subtitles.

So now I'm paying, but I still get sub-par content?

I ended up using a plugin to add the subtitles back in, but that plugin works on pirate streams too. Could've pirated it in the first place.

Why is that even necessary? Youtube offers you the full list to choose from and I don't see users writhing on the ground clutching their skulls in agonizing confusion. Users can handle a list of languages just fine.

This industry thinks too little of users.

[0] https://theuxblog.com/blog/redesigning-user-experience

Not true. I'm pretty sure it's licensing cost. In Germany most movies have subtitles only in German, while a handful also in English -- all Netflix originals and maybe some others. Meanwhile, basically all series have English subtitles for some arcane reason.

For me Netflix is a series-only service, I've given up on finding any movie worth watching that would have English subtitles.

For some reason I also get different subtitle options on my phone than I do my television despite both being on the same network (no vpn).

I also hate that they offer a show with audio in the original language, but no subtitles for the same language. So you have to be either mostly fluent or forced to watch the dubbed version.

For the same inscrutable reasons that the film industry insists on schemes like DVD region locking, they are also generally against making a single version of a movie with all subtitles available.

Subscription services fees can quickly add if not managed properly, so the convenience they offer completely evaporates if you force customers to juggle their subscriptions between different services to cover all their needs.

To customers that "services juggling" is pretty much the exact opposite of "convenience", but signing up for everything, all the time, is not an option for many as that would cost some serious money.

So what will most likely end up happening is that people stick to one, maybe two, services covering most of their needs, and just get whatever else they want trough means that don't require them to manage a subscription, like piracy.

It should also be mentioned that even piracy does offer paid subscriptions, where users pay money to get more convenient and reliable access to content, that's pretty much what Usenet and all debrid are.

But unlike legal streaming services, their libraries are not compartmentalized and limited by publishing rights.

Forget about streaming services, you can rent nearly every big screen movie ever from iTunes, Google Play, or Amazon, instantly for $3-6 dollars. Adjusting for inflation, these prices are very much comparable with what video rental stores used to offer. iTunes alone has more than 100k movies (for perspective Netflix doesn't even have 10k).

Many in this thread (and to a lesser extent the article) are acting like movie watchers want to pay money, but it's just too complicated to do so. Renting a movie on iTunes/Play/Amazon is at least as easy as torrenting something, and the selection is massive.

"If I can watch any movie ever for $10/month, I'll do it, but otherwise I'll just pirate them" is a very strange viewpoint IMHO. I would like unlimited groceries for $10/month, but I'm not going to just to stealing them because that's not an option.

For heavy consumers, the renting fees will add up quickly and the selection on those stores is not as flawless as you make it out to be.

To this day Amazon still demands more money for anything better than SD quality, information about supplied subs/dubs is spotty at best, if they are even supplied at all. Bonus content? Completely missing.

Why deal with that when for nearly the same amount of money you can often order a complete Bluray and own the movie in a physical format? Not just a "temporary license to stream"?

> "If I can watch any movie ever for $10/month, I'll do it, but otherwise I'll just pirate them" is a very strange viewpoint IMHO.

Then it's good nobody here claimed anything like that. But you are still stuck in this "all pirates are cheap freeloaders" mode, when in reality piracy usually happens in addition to the user already being a heavily paying fan of the medium [0]. Piracy supplements that when it's more convenient/not legally available/past the monthly budget.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-...

For whatever reason, it seems that certain eras of film from various countries are just missing from streaming catalogs. Not only are the films missing, but they can be incredibly hard to find on services due to naming and translated names. Recently, I was trying to watch Cure aka Kyua (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cure_(film)), good luck asking Siri to find this movie. The name "Cure" brings up nothing related, and "Kyua" is essentially not recognized. I found 1 or 2 films by the director, by searching his name directly. It's a cluster, and it's frankly a shame that I have to resort to piracy when I'd absolutely be willing to pay for such movies.

I expect this wouldn't be in much demand since, at least for me, one viewing is usually plenty. Which is why the rolling updates don't bother me much. For those few that warrant repeat viewings I can get a physical copy.

The tough thing to find even with rental would be some foreign movies, e.g. Korean.

1: https://www.kanopy.com/

The local ones start selling vape pens and CBD oil and then they closed up shrug

Video store is not an option - there are none. Sometimes I've resorted to ordering, but it's gotten to the point where it feels like enough of a pain compared to streaming that I have on occasion bought things on Prime that I have sitting in one of my DVD boxes rather than spend the time to find the DVD.

Back to torrenting I went.

1. BluRay

2. MakeMKV

3. Kodi

This is relatively future proof because unless I either get a bigger living room wall or sit uncomfortably closer to the screen 1080p is indistinguishable from 4k. I get whichever cut I want all the commentaries &c. I have all the discs in 3-ring binders with disc holders just in case there is a cut or featurette or whatever I'd like to watch at some point in the future.

Note that Disney has announced they are no longer going to re-release their back-catalog on physical media, so if you are a fan of their stuff, get the used BD now before it goes way up in price. I expect other studios will follow suit as well.

I chose not to get cable when I first moved in on my own in 2004 and allowed myself to buy TV shows and movies I wanted budgeted to the monthly cost of cable (I rarely actually ran up against that budget; at one point craigslist loaded with TV shows and movies for pennies on the dollar). I now have enough movies and TV shows to last me a very long time.

Only downside: I won't get to see GoT season 8 until December.

Have you heard of a thing called cable?

True, after Netflix anchored it's price at a reasonable level for it's offerings, I probably would not pay 10x more. But a service that made it easy to watch everything under one interface could get more money out of me than Netflix.

By one interface I mean search and/or browse in one place, click a video, optionally pay or subscribe with one click if needed, rinse, repeat. No switching between different catalogs, launching different apps, anything like that. Launching a different app for viewing is acceptable if it's super slick.

Amazon Prime has most of this (and x-ray is cool), so it tends to get my money more than other services, but it still doesn't have anywhere near every title I want to watch, and it's sometimes expensive enough that I will switch to a different service for a significant discount.

All of it is about convenience to access content. Netflix had it at first when its library was "fresh". But since it is a rolling library instead of an ever growing one, it almost never has the movie I want to watch.

Blade Runner is the first example that came to mind and I believe that it is a good one. it is an acclaimed movie that should be very easy to find online.

I would be ready to pay more for a Netflix like service with "everything". Actually I used to pay for multiple services at once.

Would I pay 10 times ? I don't think so, personally I don't value such a service that highly but that's a subjective opinion (just like somebody could rightfully say that for them Netflix or Spotify are too costly) and a bit of a straw-man IMO.

If you're looking for an ever growing library of specific movies you want to watch, with the special features you want to consume, it sounds like you just want to buy movies. Netflix and co. were never that and were never advertised as that.

Additionally, I am in 6 countries for 9 months of this year. It is inconvenient that YouTube TV tells me the $35 I am paying them buys me absolutely nothing, despite the app saying "some content and local channels" will not be available, Netflix forces me to stop halfway through a series because I crossed a border. That's not convenient.

Piracy just works.

It took me one year to transfer my google account to another country.

I am not doing it again.

They are the only ones allowed to license the work in a region, so providibg a movie or selection requires separate licensing agreements for every country or region it is served in.

Businesses that manage to take fees for nothing due historic reasons need to be eliminated.

My gut prediction is that if a service has a strong correlation to the desired content, E.G. Disney+ for "kids", it MIGHT work out, at least in the short term. HOWEVER, for wider culture, and particularly with different "tv networks" and studios with content libraries split among many services, the friction of not having a single place with everything, of not having a 'streaming store', will drive many to routing around the insanity and accessing the culture they want on terms they're willing to agree to.

Short version:

    * have everything, I mean it.
    * cost less than basic cable (total)
    * completely ad free (probably)
    * offline caching is a must (road trips)
    * capable of playing on anything I want (DRM free)

Interesting way of saying "corporate exclusivity agreements", which is what this ends up being in 99 out of 100 cases.

It's more like: check sites 1-5 looking for the movie, can't find it (or it a PPV download, OR the app/site doesn't support 5.1 DDS, its quality is bad) get frustrated go onto $torrentsite, sort by size, download one with most seeders & a larger file size wait 30-60 min and done.

Netflix used to make it easier as their app UX and quality are high so it was a one stop shop. Now i just find torrenting easier to make sure its high quality with 5.1.. however i may not be the norm.

I understand that many displays have decent interpolation features these days, which hide the issues, but they are still a solution to an unnecessary problem.

A bluray or a good rip of it delivers the film in proper fashion. It's a non-issue with pirated content.

It's a stupid and frustrating experience and every time it happens is a reminder that my interests as a customer rank dead last after all of these companies slice and dice their cultural fiefdoms into separate packages to squeeze a little extra revenue. Calling it a few finger budges is reductive, it's an insulting and tiresome rigmarole of hoops that I have to jump through just because they wanted to squeeze some more money.

Everyone does a bit of pirating here and there, and I think the media companies realize it's a cost of doing business. But something tells me they wouldn't look too fondly on an organised, multi-user pirated content distribution platform...

Here in Canada there are some big chains (Best Buy, Staples) being sued for telling people at point-of-purchase that they can watch free content on an Android box.

This is why they are "peer to peer". The bittorrent protocol for example downloads files in fragments, and every fragment that you have downloaded becomes available for other clients (i.e. you start becoming a server as soon as you have downloaded one fragment)

I don't think there is a fundamental moral right to a particular pattern of bits in the first place to defend.

btw if anybody wants to add some goodies to plex, i created browser extensions that add trailers and random sorting. check them out!

https://github.com/conceptualspace/metatrailer-for-plex

https://github.com/conceptualspace/shuffle-for-plex

Edit: I think iris was something I did more recently, I don't remember what it was using originally. I just wanted to play with go a little bit. The "front end" itself is a single page with an upload button and a box to paste a magnet link, it's not like it's doing much. Plex does all the real work here.

That's not really what it's about. You have no idea how utterly janky Plex and torrenting is. People on Hacker News find IT stimulating, so their experience is basically moot. It's like trying to predict trends based on a nerd's hot take of the iPod.

It has always been about enforcement. Seen in this lens, the hassle of pirating movies is itself a form of enforcement of copyright protections, even if the IT is not a legal instrument.

Enforcement has definitely weakened. Why though? It wasn't limited to bad PR, although again the Hacker News crowd is wildly incomparable to the population at large when it comes to issues like this.

What has changed is that TV makers are also now Internet providers. They are recouping the costs of piracy by raising your Internet prices. They don't make content you consume in the rest of the world, so naturally in the rest of the world fast Internet is dirt cheap.

Calling this a consequence of consolidation is accurate! It's just not about consolidation among ISPs, but between producers and ISPs.

And on top of that, all the people who held onto the cord were subsidizing your television. Now that they finally cut the cord, who's going to pay for it?

I don't know anything about Plex, but torrenting is pretty effortless compared to figuring out which streaming service what you want to watch is on, figuring out how to get that, evaluating other content it has trying to justify the price, figuring out how to get it to your tv, and figuring out how to use it. The only thing I've seen that confuses people about torrenting is having to open a port.

I think the thing that limits torrenting is the ISP emails, not any of this "nobody cares about your nerd stuff" know-nothing pseudo folk wisdom. People figure it out in five minutes, it looks too easy so it feels criminal, then they get an email from their ISP, so they retreat back to the difficult stuff out of paranoia because they vaguely remember stories about people getting in absurdly disproportionate trouble for it.

For your conspiracy to be valid, I'd have to see significant evidence that internet costs have gone up in the US. Mine have gone down. Evidence that it's cheaper in other parts of the world is utterly irrelevant.

Damn. You just nailed this. In fact, hearing it this way makes me confused as to why anyone would ever use a streaming service to start.

I live in Canada - which is just an awful country to be in for seeing the message 'this video is not available in your country'. For years, I exclaimed 'this is dumb and just makes me visit the Pirate Bay next, it won't be long before other people do, too'.

You know what I wish was still open? Blockbuster. I miss walking out to a store, picking out a movie, pretty much any movie I wanted (new releases might be picky/choosy) - and renting it for a couple days for $2-3. That...honestly seemed like the best all-around deal for movie producers and consumers.

Replace the "unskippable 'you criminal' you" DVD previews with the descriptions of determining where, what, when, etc.

https://boingboing.net/2010/02/18/infographic-buying-d.html

The 300 separate streaming services need to understand that they need a friction level very close to the "if you are a pirate" box at the top in order to prevent their customers from returning to the pirate route. And having 300 separate services, with disjoint content, is not at all near the friction level of the "if you are a pirate" box at the top of the infographic.

I don't think this is an option anymore. There was never a time when a Blockbuster store's collection could match Netflix/Hulu/Prime. In particular, there's so much more media being created now, that there's no way a physical shelf space could keep up. If you consider just TV, think about how many more channels there are compared to the heyday of Blockbuster. I just checked Fandango, there's over 20 movies opening this week alone. How could a Blockbuster keep up with that? I think the reason it felt that way might be related to the paradox of choice. There were fewer options, we got the "lottery win"/dopamine hit from finding that new movie when there was only one copy left to rent, etc. I think our brains artificially limited the set of things we "wanted" to watch to what was on the shelf, which was surely never that robust of a collection compared to what you get from something like Netflix today.

This is ridiculously often the usual experience outside the US, if the content is legally available at all... Or I can just torrent the same content with my desired subs/dubs or buy a game on steam an play it in my desired language...

You can do this now with Netflix - but they will ship you DVD's.

Try your local library

They often have a significant DVD section.

You can find the good ones, but if my parents were going to torrent stuff they'd either be scared away or end up with crap on their computer.

I go paid services first but many times it's so janky i say fuck it and launch the add-on and it works.

I bought an Xbox One instead of a PS4 even though I like the anime games on the PS4 because the Xbox One has a perfect Plex client and the PS4 client is known to be "janky"

I struggled with cheap Android TV devices and broke down and bought a NVIDIA Shield TV because it has a perfect Plex client too with adequate hardware.

Pending you don't want to watch something in Dolby Vision.

I can either have Dolby Atmos come from the shield and a HDR video, or Dolby Vision through the TV and compressed AC3 audio of some kind from the TV.

Asking for both is apparently too much...

Compare these experiences:

1. Search Netflix. Discover it's not there.

2. Search Amazon. Discover they have it, but it's not available for free as part of your subscription.

3. Search Hulu. Leave Hulu, because it's not there.

4. Finally go back to Amazon and rent the movie, not sure why you're paying for Prime if you still have to pay on top of that for half the stuff you watch.

5. Watch your content, with network interruptions if you're new popular releases (i.e. recent Game of Thrones).

6. Pay three monthly bills every month, a large percentage of which gets you overlapping content, but only pays to the content creators for the service you watch it on.

Versus:

1. Search a torrent site.

2. Select a save location in your torrent client.

3. Go make popcorn.

4. Watch your content uninterrupted by network issues or ads, for free, even if you're not connected to the internet.

Which is the janky experience?

And this is if you remove regions and internet connection reliability from the equation.

I'm not arguing you should torrent, incidentally. My preferred experience is to purchase content directly from the content creators when possible.

[1] https://help.hulu.com/s/article/how-much-does-hulu-cost?lang...

EDIT: Okay, sure, there are some use paths where streaming services are easier. But my point here isn't to say that streaming is worse, it's to say that torrenting is absolutely comparable and not some highly technical, difficult thing to do.

Otherwise if you're downloading stuff off the pirate bay it's either going to get you nailed pretty quickly for IP infringement, or you'll end up with fake files and a virus thats labeled as a codec you need to install.

Running a VPN or seedbox or any of the other numerous things to get around this (usenet is my own weapon of choice) results in what may be for you and I an easy or even fun activity, but not for my sisters kid or whatever.

I don't know much about private trackers because I don't actually torrent illegally (I pretty much only use torrents to seed Linux distros). But I'm skeptical "getting nailed" is actually much of a concern. I had a roommate not long ago who torrented illegally quite frequently. The only reason we know it was happening is we'd receive love letters from the ISP every few weeks, and while I suspect I know who was doing it, I'm not 100% sure. As far as I know there were never any consequences beyond that.

> you'll end up with fake files and a virus thats labeled as a codec you need to install

I am pretty skeptical that this is as common as you think it is. Certainly the kind of naive person who is installing codecs that unexpectedly were packaged with their files is not going to have an easy time on any part of the internet. And if you're using a site like EZTV the chances of this approach negligible.

> Running a VPN or seedbox or any of the other numerous things to get around this (usenet is my own weapon of choice) results in what may be for you and I an easy or even fun activity, but not for my sisters kid or whatever.

I use NordVPN (again, not for illegally torrenting--I originally got it for testing internationalization, but nowadays mostly use it because it's a middle ground between the privacy of Tor and the speed of un-proxied internet). The toolbar icon makes it pretty easy. I suspect the main barrier here would be even knowing that VPNs exist and wanting to pay for it, not actually using a VPN service once you have it.

Peer blacklists aren't perfect, but they can cut your chances of getting busted by known IP cops quite a bit.

1. Search Google for movie you want to watch.

2. Google shows a handy "Available on" frame at the top of the page, with prices (if applicable) and services that it's on.

3. Click the link.

4. Watch.

And you can rest easy knowing that you're not breaking the law because you're cheap and for some reason feel entitled to getting things for free.

Does it, though? https://imgur.com/Yxac3mL

I turned off my ad blocker and all other Chrome extensions and tried again before taking this screenshot, and really have no idea what you're talking about.

Still, the fact that Google has a workaround for this issue shows that it is an issue.

I've seen plenty of sites that also combine all the streaming service lists and let you search for specific movies or just browse based on genre.

Could it maybe be easier? Sure. But I'd argue it's still a lot easier than pirating...

It is sad to me that this is how you consider your fellow human beings.

Putting aside how disrespectful this assumption is to your users, I don't think it's true for all your users. It may be true for enough of your users that it looks like a good idea in A/B testing, but I'd guess there are enough users who don't want to be treated like a child being told what to watch, that some significant number of them are going to go elsewhere. Some of those who leave will go pirate the content they want.

Ultimately, I think bundling content with your platform and trying to force users to buy one to have the other is anticompetitive, and harmful to users, so it shouldn't be surprising that some users are looking outside platforms for their content.

>It may be true for enough of your users that it looks like a good idea in A/B testing

It's really impossible to say since everyone's numbers are biased and no one shares them. But what I was getting at originally was that the use case highlighted by OP was not the common case. Users don't search various services looking for a specific piece of content, they usually pull up to follow what they were watching previously or to browse a catalog, where the twisted incentives come into play is when a user finishes the content and the platform tries to keep them hooked.

>I'd guess there are enough users who don't want to be treated like a child being told what to watch

I mean that's fair, but also a bad characterization. There are certainly bad incentives at play when you want to do everything to keep content discovery in a feedback loop, but there's not exactly an alternative when the people you need to license content from are your streaming competitors.

>Ultimately, I think bundling content with your platform and trying to force users to buy one to have the other is anticompetitive

I get the arguments for that, and I agree with some of them. But right now services compete on the merits of content itself, and as a result we have more content being created that's more diverse and at lower prices. When HBO Max and Disney+ go up we'll see how massive back catalogs affect the space, but right now the prevailing wisdom is to throw money at content creators - and I appreciate that as a content consumer.

If you want the opposite of streaming, look at movie theaters. They don't compete on content availability - yet the diversity of content is down, barrier to entry is high, and prices have been rising for years.

This is a very black and white statement, and as such I can directly say it is wrong because I do this.

If you meant "most users", I'd like to see what the breakdown is. Even if "most" is true, if a significant portion don't, then a significant portion has an incentive to pirate because streaming services don't fit their use case.

> they usually pull up to follow what they were watching previously or to browse a catalog,

Following what they were watching previously is looking for a specific piece of content...

It's a fairly simple case to solve, but it also breaks when the streaming service you're subscribed to no longer licenses the show you were watching--again, going back to the problem of needing multiple streaming services to gain access to all content.

> If you want the opposite of streaming, look at movie theaters. They don't compete on content availability

Huh? Yes they do. Maybe at one time people went to the movies and just saw whatever was playing, but now people look up what's showing online, and if there isn't anything they want to see, they don't go. It would be inconvenient not to, because you might show up at a time when no movies are starting and have to wait.

> - yet the diversity of content is down, barrier to entry is high, and prices have been rising for years.

There are a lot of confounding factors here.

I have no idea how many people know someone who's dedicated enough to setup such as system, but there are many such systems, so I don't think it's moot. Nor is this a prediction of the future, this exists, with many users already.

Who's going to pay for it? Netflix. Despite not needing to pay them to watch their shows, Netflix still gets my money. Netflix pays producers for shows that are on Netflix, so those producers still get my money. It's going to be a hard sell to pay for additional services, as the post we're commenting point out.

The non-Netflix services that will survive, regardless, is anything that must be watched in real-time, aka sports. Those add up quick! NFL, NBA, MLB, and UFC all charge a pretty penny to watch their events live. There are pirate streams though, but for dedicated fans, on the real thing is good enough.

There is also no technical barrier to streaming torrented video on the web. Peertube etc demonstrate distributed video effectively.

Just change provider every 3 months to a different one, then binge it all.

Maybe a service that automatically deactivates your account at the best point in the billing-cycle? If you could do it without too much overlap you could actually do it on a monthly basis:

Jan - Netflix

Feb - Disney+

.

.

The core selling point of streaming movies and shows is the "on demand" part. It removes an entire dimension from the problem of planning movie nights or your personal entertainment. If a show is available on the service you're subscribing to, you can watch it any time you want. With enough shows available, this boiled down to "any time I want to watch something, there's something interesting to me available".

Now with the balkanization of streaming space and people already doing provider rotation manually, the experience becomes more like this: "sorry hon, we won't be watching X tonight because it's on HBO, and we're switching to it next month, and Y we wanted to check out just got pulled from Netflix and is on CBS now, which is not worth paying for, and Z is geolocked everywhere, so I guess we have to find something else...".

... which can be quickly followed by: "you know what, I saw a streaming site that's not exactly official, but it costs like $4/month for ad-free experience, has every show you can name available - even ones nobody streams anymore - and guess what, it's perfectly legal to use; so screw the official platforms, and let's watch X tonight".

It's greed that's dooming the streaming services.

This already happens now if you're only subbed to Netflix.

They are constantly removing titles.

It definitely starts to feel like a schedule because now it's like "I have to watch this before October 1st otherwise it'll be pulled".

The worst is when you deal with series too. Like casually watching a 6 season series and you get to the end of season 1, give it a break for a bit but then when you want to resume it a month or 2 later the entire thing is gone.

Combined with a horrible browsing ability for your watch list and you end up adding these great shows to your list but then 2 months later you have no idea how many of them are gone since you can only browse like 6 titles at a time on your watch list that might have hundreds of titles.

Once you feel pressured into watching things due to a fear of missing out you've entered a dangerous place and this is when people will begin looking for alternatives.

Edit: I don't think this is a positive thing for Netflix. And trying to keep up with it probably would just give customers anxiety. But it's a constant reminder that you don't really get to watch what you want with Netflix, which I think is useful to be reminded of now and then.

If you can barely remember what you ate for dinner 6 nights ago, how are you going to remember the ~50 titles they are removing at varying days in September?

Plus, sites and patterns like this just further fuel the "better watch what Netflix says to watch" motto. Your viewing selections are shaped by what's coming and going instead of what you want to watch.

Yeah until they spread out releases of a program over long periods to force you to keep a subscription. Eg Hulu and Disney (1).

The reason people pirate is they want to watch WHAT they want, WHEN they want, in the REGION they want and on the DEVICE they want. The content makers want to control all those things.

https://thestreamable.com/news/disney-is-saying-no-to-binge-...

I will stop short of saying they will "fail" because we all know they won't, they have too much money, but I think they will certainly discourage people from giving them money if they try to enforce some drip-feed delivery model just to squeeze more money out of their customers.

I mean they could just host their stuff on Netflix/iTunes/Amazon but no let's build an entire new server farm doing the exact same work, likely on the exact same hardware and the exact same software, because some executive somewhere got a bug in his ass about Apple taking 30% for providing merely a marketplace, userbase, advertising, delivery model, customer support...

Idk. From a non-industry person this seems like common sense, but I also don't understand how VC backed companies burning billions of dollars to schedule McDonalds deliveries is a long-term business model so maybe this is just some galaxy brain business head stuff.

IMO I prefer to buy a game from the developer and get it cheaper or give the money to the creator but this days most games are on stores and not on the dev website, a good example is Minecraft ,it would probably be more expensive if it would have been on Steam and I would have to install the Steam client to play the game, and I could not play game A on my PC and my son to play game B on his PC, I am forced to use the trick of getting into offline mode.

My point is that in some cases Steam or Apple taking 30% is too much, now that Steam has some competition they made some deals with big publisher but this big percentage are to large for some products.

In this debate though many people ignore the creators and feel entitled that the app,game or movie be on his preferred store and using his preferred payment method.

I am sure there are cases where the store works great too.

There is a version of Minecraft on the Microsoft Store but it's not nearly as popular.

The user would go to a central place where all streaming options are available to be browsed and watched. The point of differentiation would be at payment, as the cost to the user, for whatever they just selected, would go to those who own the rights. No walled gardens, everyone wins. The user pays one monthly price, or within a fixed range. How to figure that all out, well, that's where complexities arise.

My personal soltuion, thus far, is to pay for the service I'm using the most (currently, MhZ Choice), then find other solutions for that which I don't pay for.

I'm from the Netherlands. I live in Sweden. In both countries the banks have been able to set up a shared service to make digital payments easy for consumers, despite them being competitors[0][1]. In the Netherlands we also have one national transport chip-card used by all public transport providers[2].

Based on that I would say that what this may need is just the right amount of (and type of) government regulation to force the different competitors to play nice enough to create a better end-product for consumers and to compete healthily with each other. I won't pretend to know what that regulation would look like though.

[0] https://www.tikkie.me/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment)

[2] https://www.ov-chipkaart.nl/home-1.htm

The problem is with the exclusive deals, with the IP holders ruining the space for everyone in an attempt to maximize short-term revenue (it will kill their long-term revenue), perhaps thinking this is battle royale, and they obviously will be a platform that wins in the end.

I don't think it's the Highlander end-game they are envisioning, rather there seems to be a drive towards a new (imagined) equilibrium with specific streaming services servicing specific demographics — like Disney is aiming straight for the 'wholesome and family-friendly'-niche.

Of course we all lose as consumers (until you hoist the Jolly Roger in despair).

You know that hip, edgy Vice News, the one with stories about doing drugs in war torn Africa? Yeah Disney owns like ~16-20% of that.

Disney is EVERYWHERE; be afraid of The Mouse.

All the edgier material goes on Hulu apparently.

Or at least I did, until they put the price up and I noticed they had bundled in another service without me realising and I was actually paying 3 times more than I thought. Had been meaning to cancel for a while, but that made me pull the trigger

Considering the actual compression quality of HBO is much worse than Netflix or Amazon and the app sucks to use, it seems like they don't have the resources at HBO to actually do streaming well.

Overall, it doesn't really seem like an efficient way to buy content for either them or me. It's like if a studio made their own DVD player.

1) Create virtual card

2) Switch payment method to new card

3) Delete virtual card

4) Cha ching !

It's a hassle, but this makes companies not willing to go after the debt.

Alternatively, they can do the same as the ISPs around here: jack up the sticker price, then give a large discount - conditional on your permanence as a client for X months. If you decide to cancel, you have to pay them back the discount accrued.

Then the model simply shifts: 1. Get credit card numbers illegally 2. Create Netflix accounts with those credit cards 3. Sell those accounts on EBay, even after the user reports the card as stolen it will continue to work.

If you never again plan on taking part in the economy, it may be a convenient solution, though.

That’s not going to happen with a virtual card you canceled.

In 2003, people said that the iTunes music store was going to be a disaster. Who would pay to download music when they could get it for free. That worked out pretty well.

Depending on the country, you'd be surprised.

I'm not sure why Disney has the hold it has in the US, but in most of Europe I know it's nothing special (to the point of being a "must have" brand). Kids can just sit in front of regular kids TV channels. And normal middle class families can and do pirate all the time...

Short videos maybe, but I don't think I know anybody, young or old, who cares of streaming full movies on mobile. Maybe some outliers who watch their series on their commute...

The vast majority watch movies when they are at home...

You make it sound like they waste some fortune on those, so it necessarily has to have a huge market to justify building one.

On the contrary, regardless of whether they have a big mobile watching userbase (and I'm wrong) or not (and I'm right), it still makes sense to have a mobile app.

First, the mobile app budget is a drop in the bucket compared to their operating costs (bandwidth, marketing, offices, license deals, etc). So there's not much of a waste even if nobody uses it, which makes making a mobile app available a no-brainer.

Second, it would bad (competition wise) not having one anyway, even if few really use it...

Third, even if it's just e.g. 10% that watches movies on mobile, why not get them too?

Fourth, it's note that they actually invest specially in their mobile apps to begin with. Usually they use some cross platform framework they use for their web and/or desktop version.

Fifth, do you have better numbers, or some other empirical observations from people you know? Do you see rampant movie watching on the go?

As far as the direction that video viewing is going.

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-people-spend-more-...

The difference in time was even more pronounced for younger Americans, with people 18 to 34 spending 1 hour and 51 minutes on live and time-shifted TV and 3 hours and 25 minutes on the web or apps on smartphone and tablets in the third quarter of last year, Nielsen said.

Still, I don't see your problem. Given how good browsers are on mobile, a pirate streaming site isn't that much worse or less convenient on a phone than Netflix or YouTube app. You select the video you want to watch, tap Play, tap "full screen", and enjoy the show.

Also, it takes some amount of extra work to create an iPad app than an iPhone app. Once again, is the entire media industry delusional or should they be taking advice from HN users?

Just like I said....

https://hackertimes.com/item?id=21005204

- I type "fili.cc" in my Firefox on Android

- I don't like anything currently in suggestions, so I tap on the search box, type in "Avengers", and press Search

- I tap the first result, as it is the movie I'm looking for

- On the move page, I tap on one of the players listed

- A video box loads, I press its Play button, then Full Screen button, and watch the movie

It's literally one tap more than Netflix; since this is a site curating pirated streaming sources, I have to pick one of the "players" (each representing a movie source with a bundled JS player).

fili.cc is one of many of such sites; different people I know have their own favorites.

So do none of the "people you know" use iOS devices?

The US is like 4% of the planet. The world is much bigger than New York, North Platte, Dallas, and Des Moines combined, and there are many countries where what the parent said is common place...

To put it in perspective, Netflix has something like 151 subscribers worldwide. The other 7.3 billion people use something else, and it's not Hulu or Disney...

Do you really think the total addressable market for people who might buy a streaming service is 7.3 billion?

Anyway, I'm not sure what's your point here.

Or more relevant see Disney. Disney makes a killing with its resorts where the price per ticket is $100+ per day and most people pay for more than one day, but souvenirs, and stay at one of their hotels.

Groups like hardcore Disney fans, R. Kelly fans, and Evangelical Christians all share a very similar devotion and loyalty to their idols.

In either case, they're both almost a Cult of personality. The fans are so adorant of their object that they often overlook glaringly evil deeds. At the same time, the level of manipulation exhibited and the devotion demanded by the personality is extreme to the point that outsiders see it as absurd.

Idk, maybe it's just me but I find fanaticism to be very off putting in general. When the idol asks fans to make sacrifices to stay it in their favor, that's when it crosses a line into creepy.

Disney walks a fine line where it expertly cultivates that culture while simultaneously pretending it doesn't exist and remaining open and accessible to everyone.

This verges on the tautological though, given that "fan" is short for "fanatic"; you're complaining that fanatics are fanatics. Well... yeah, but so? I don't think you can directly impute the behavior of the fans on to the target of their fandom. (You can draw some indirect conclusions, but it involves at least a few steps of lower reliability and propositions people will find debatable.)

Eh, that's its (probable) origin, but I'd say the two have diverged in meaning; "fan" nowadays doesn't have the same connotation of extreme and uncritical zeal of "fanatic."

Disney has been accused of gross labor and environmental violations across the globe. So while R. Kelly has caused severe damage to a few, Disney has caused minor to moderate damage to a great number.

I'm not stating that a fan of a franchise, like Marvel Comics, specifically is accepting of Disney's scope of misdeeds or even considering them a Disney fan in this case. I'm speaking directly to the Disney fan, those people who specifically travel to Disney parks multiple times a year, go on the cruises repeated, and consume the Disney branded merchandise in volume.

Then maybe companies and enterprises shouldn't do all they can to be treated like men...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/corporations-are-people-a_b_5...

We don't even watch regular TV anymore at my home. It's either Netflix or Youtube.

The first 3 star wars films where important for their era, but most of the later ones are just forgettable sci-fi (for non-discerning fans). Not to mention letting down parts of the canon (e.g. the Solo movie, or "Kylo Ren", a hipster/teenage goth abomination that took Darth Vader's iconic status and pissed all over it).

Marvel too has movie diarrhea, with 1 in 10 movies being anything to write home about (eg. Logan).

I'd vote for less superhero movies and less Star Wars reboots and sequels/prequels, and more original stories. Plus, where's that Foundation series?

I really like the Star Wars universe, but the only good new movie was Rogue One. It worked because it was a completely separate story only loosely tied to the original films.

Personally I love both anthologies, and I love them a lot more than the new trilogy (I love Luke's role, but I have doubts about where the trilogy as a whole is going). I know Solo bombed, but for me it was the movie I'd been waiting 30 years for, and I wasn't disappointed.

That stuff takes balls, and I'm enjoying it a lot.

It's true that superheroes do dominate the current movie landscape maybe a bit too much. Nerds won and now everything has to be SciFi, Fantasy, Horror or Superheroes. I wouldn't object to dialing that back a bit, but only a bit.

There are at least a few of us out there who think the same as you. The one difference is I haven't watched one in the theater in years.

For the Legends storyline, I loved the X-Wings series of books (basically how the Rebels defeated the major parts of the Empire): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BJST00W . My favorite book in the series is The Bacta War, there's a lot of small ship action instead of the movies where huge fleets are the norm.

Also in Legends, try the Thrawn trilogy starting with Heir To The Empire https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004WBXM80/ . It's a good set of books with a real threat to the Rebellion.

As for Disney canon, frankly a lot of the books are very meh at best - many of them are just to set up Disney World/Land Black Spire Outpost land. The only one I would recommend is perhaps the new Thrawn trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1101967021/ - be warned that the second book in the trilogy (Thrawn: Alliances) gets rather slow at times, but the third book (Thrawn: Treason) is actually pretty fun.

Another X-Wings fan! Bacta War was awesome, I must've re-read it like 10 times :-D

(Not to mention that only maybe a quarter of these movies are worth seeking out, the rest are something I’d only ever watch for free on an airplane or something. But that’s just personal taste).

Also: tons of Pixar movies. And I still haven't seen The Lion King and Aladdin. Or pretty much any Disney movie other than Brave.

If it's not your thing, that's fine, but I've got two kids, and Netflix is a bit short on movies for the whole family that are fun for both kids as well as parents. They're great at stuff for just the kids or just the parents, but for the whole family is what Pixar and Disney are good at.

There are many options here. That's one of the upsides of pirating non-DRM media. Storage is stupid cheap and anybody on HN should be able to figure out how to get an arbitrary mp4 file onto an arbitrary screen.

HN users seem to be way out of touch with the average user.

Not to mention it greatly simplifies other matters. If you drop a bunch of movies onto your kids tablet, you no longer have to worry about being away from a cell tower or wifi AP. Furthermore, concerning this very article, there is the matter of too many streaming platforms existing. Maybe you only need Disney because you don't let your kids consume any other brand. But probably more likely, there are numerous desirable movies that are on one streaming platform but not another, or on none at all. And a movie that might be on a platform one year could be gone the next. A harddrive full of movies avoids all of this mess. Subscribe to two or three services a year and you'll be spending a lot more than $8 a month. Maybe it still seems trivial to you with an inflated tech salary, but I know a lot of people who think a single netflix subscription is too expensive so they share an account with other friends/family. This is pretty common.

> HN users seem to be way out of touch with the average user.

I am certainly not out of touch with my own friends and family!

Roku is the most popular streaming device and it only supports H.264 for attached storage and its very picky on what it will support.

The obscure edge-cases are things that HN users might be aware of, but simply aren't a practical concern in practice. DLNA is generally the case where you might run into issues, but a transcoding DLNA server solves that problem.

So now you've added even more complexity and a regular DLNA server/client has what is far from a user friendly interface like Plex.

If you drop a bunch of movies onto your kids tablet, you no longer have to worry about being away from a cell tower or wifi AP. Furthermore,

So now we have a streaming DLNA server, transcoding, bit torrenting, and copying the movie to the device as opposed to paying $8 a month and just click "download" to put it on the device?

A harddrive full of movies avoids all of this mess. Subscribe to two or three services a year and you'll be spending a lot more than $8 a month. Maybe it still seems trivial to you with an inflated tech salary,

And the people not in tech are going to jump through all of the hoops you are suggesting?

How poor do you think the average household in the US is that close to 50% are paying for iOS devices and not going to pay $25 a month for a few streaming services? Do you realize what they are already paying for cable?

I am certainly not out of touch with my own friends and family!

Your friends and family are not a representative sample....

And if my family can do it, I am quite sure your family can too. I think the attitude you're demonstrating here exemplifies a problem with the industry in general these days; giving non-technical people too little credit.

None of this stuff is complicated, but when a technical person such as yourself tells a non-technical person that they're incapable of wrapping their mind around something, it becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy as they're now scared of even trying. And without trying, neither of you will ever learn what their true capabilities are.

Running your own server, finding good torrents, risk getting emails from your ISP or paying for a VPN service, dealing with networking and making sure the correct port is open and then dealing with the crappy upload bandwidth that most Americans have....

If you prefer keeping everything on a thumb drive or your phone's SD card, do that instead.

Most people don't have phones with SD cards and the majority of middle class to upper middle class households in the US have iOS devices...

And if my family can do it, I am quite sure your family can too. I think the attitude you're demonstrating here exemplifies a problem with the industry in general these days; giving non-technical people too little credit.

There are plenty of people that can cook but that doesn't prevent them from eating out. Convenience beats cheap.

None of this stuff is complicated, but when a technical person such as yourself tells a non-technical person that they're incapable of wrapping their mind around something, it becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy as they're now scared of even trying. And without trying, neither of you will ever learn what their true capabilities are

It's not about what people can't do -- it's about what people don't want to do. My wife and I both have cars but when we want to spend a night out and go to downtown from the suburbs we take Uber for the convenience.

And if you define the “middle class to upper class”, by definition you get 50% to 60% (3-5 quintile) of the US - the exact population that streaming products are targeting.

Yes, but the overall market also doesn't jibe with taste, as Zappa would say...

Also, I may have to wait until my smart TV supports it. We never had these kind of problems when we just had cable. (Or did we?)

The Muppet Show seems to be missing, though there's lots of other muppet stuff. Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal are also missing, perhaps because Netflix made a new Dark Crystal show.

But what I’m talking about is if you scroll down this list, 8 of the top 100 are from Disney unless I’m missing a studio name, I’m counting BV and MGM. So those 5 are pretty much all the 2019 blockbusters you’ll get from the service in a few months.

If you're also the sort of person that considers popcorn an integral part of the movie watching experience then the streaming services is almost certainly cheaper even if you only watch those two movies a year.

It’s the same with video now. If I plan ahead, I will still pick up movies that fall off the back of a truck and put them on my Plex server, but often, we don’t even bother. We just rent from Amazon Prime or iTunes.

That’s even considering that I can just go to http://remote.vuze.com from anywhere on my phone and start a download on my home server.

I have never had a failure but I once had an issue with a purchase porting to Movies Anywhere from Google Play. Google was beyond useless in helping me out, I actually spoke with someone on the phone and it was as if they had never even seen the Play Store before. I emailed the seller about it and got an immediate email response with a couple suggestions to try before refund, the first suggestion worked.

Most people just buy a "fully loaded" android box which lists thumbnails for all the latest movies and TV shows on various file storage sites. They select a thumbnail and the movie plays. Nothing local at all, all streamed.

As hendersoon noted, nowadays, piracy is extremely low-friction.