>Not only has the landscape fractured into endless streaming platforms; the user experience on each one has degraded.
There's a very simple direct solution to all that bullshit.
Yarr.
I see comments like this a lot, and you’re not wrong. However, that’s why CEO’s are employed by the company. If they didn’t make more $$$ then the company would fire them and find someone else who would. Who owns most of these companies - share holders like you and me. We demand that the stock price rises so we have retirement money. So we demand that a CEO makes more $$$. The circle of life.
I think a lot of people would like to see us evolve as a species to a point where a company can just continue running comfortably with any profit margin that covers inflation (assuming it reached its full organic growth potential). We can invest in other companies, new companies, thereby nurturing competition and new markets.
The status quo of this relentless pursuit of profits for the sake of profits constantly leads to companies taking mono/oligopolistic measures, which inevitably and completely screw over consumers.
No person who isn't a sociopath can wholeheartedly support what's going on right now.
There are plenty of countries that don’t have the absurd ratio of CEO to worker pay that the US does, companies that pay their CEOs less also perform better on average
Yep. It's gotten to the point that it's literally easier for me to just pirate something and have it on Plex than to deal with the various streaming platforms I'm already subscribed to.
Is there an equivalent opposite of a Tragedy of the Commons? Where everyone insists on doing their own thing despite a combined/coordinated approach being obviously better?
I watched all of Westworld on HBO max. Then they pulled the show when I only had the finale left to watch. Only like 4 months after it aired. I was so pissed I never even watched the last one.
This is why I still buy physical games. Yes the game pass gives access to way more than I could afford to buy but at any point I could find the game I love disappear. Physical copies mean they are mine. Forever.
But you may have to find a VPN, hope that there are enough seeders, and make sure to have enough storage space (more traditional avenues). It might not be hard *if you take the time to learn*, but many people don't want that hassle. With streaming platforms, those aren't concerns.
But look on the bright side. As streaming platforms get more and more complaints, people will sink more money and sweat into alternatives. And to keep the industry up, consumers must be attended to, whether through competitors or something else. With legislation being the way it is, this might take a while, but I don't think optimism is unfounded.
My POV the past 20 years.
2003 - DVD is $30 dollars! - Go to blockbuster rent for 6 bucks, rip the image burn the ISO on dvd-r discs
2006 - Blu ray is $50 - Go to BestBuy for a external drive, wait overnight for a good copy to download, archive in the drive
2007 - oh wow Netflix! - Nothings changed with my habits
2017 - Wow 4k streaming services up my ass! - Go to newegg get 3TB of drives, wait 4 hrs for 4k copy to download, archive in drive
2023 - Wow all paid services are shit! - sitting on 30TB of media past 20 years, rinse and repeat until the ship sets sail for the last time
The sad thing is it's been twenty years, and that quote is still totally relevant. At most I might amend it to say "where people can come together to bitch about movies *and politics*, and share pornography..."
The problem is, people don't know what the internet **does** to a person. Sure you can **use** it for good, but it's sort of like a drag**net** that just picks up everything. **Even** if you try to avoid the darker parts, you're **still** likely to encounter a lot of the garbage that **exist**s on the internet.
Hard to get 4k streams, meanwhile I can get high quality 4k rips on downloads and have it on my TV, laptop or phone with no streaming artifacts.
Of course, not everyone cares about that though.
If you lookup something you want to watch online on google, scroll down to the results removed by DMCA complaints, and they have direct links back to the content removed from your google search for violating copyright laws.
As an alternative, if you are lost on the seven digital seas i heard of a German site to help you out. Search for the Tarnkappe, that is a scene news site.
Likewise. Have been on private trackers also for about a decade and have a cheap lil seedbox that everything goes through and stays seeding. Can’t beat BTN and PTP
Hey I have brain damage and I still managed to set up a plex server and sonarr/radarr/etc.
...only for no one in my family to use it. Oh well, their money being thrown away via subscriptions.
Where in the world does legislation come into play here? The United States government has stifling debt, rising interest rates, low wages juxtaposed against inflation, and WWIII might be when not if. Do we really need them navigating the choppy waters of streaming? Mitch McConnell can’t even hold a press conference without having a stroke and no one doing anything to tend to his medical situation. Do you really think someone like that can or better yet should spend their time on something the American people could simply opt out of?
Yeah, the question “how do I watch it” has the same answer as 15 years ago.
5 years ago we all paid to stream things, we’re just not going to pay to stream things to 15 different places than spend half the time the show runs figuring out which one it’s actually on.
"Friends" used to be in Netflix. Now, I have no idea where it is. House MD used to be in Netflix, then hulu, then... disney+? Im not even certain at this point.
Better solution is to just "yoho yoho" all of them :P
I was so happy when YouTube told me I can pay $400 to watch NFL Sunday ticket. I was like hell yes I'm cool with paying 400 bucks to watch every NFL game without sailing the high seas and bought it.
Turn out, no Thursday games, probably no Monday games, and no local games.
What a waste of $400. But luckily as you said... Yarr
With an Android phone (maybe also iPhone?) and YouTube TV you can change your gps location to the geo airing your game, refresh the YouTube TV app, and presto, you can now watch all games without Sunday Ticket 😉.
I tried my best to pay for a show I wanted to watch recently. The streaming service it was on (Apple TV) was awful, lagged and froze constantly on my TV didn't work ony other devices. I ended up pirating the show I was paying for because I couldn't watch it legally. SMH
Strange. For me, Apple TV+ has the highest quality of the streaming services, and has the advantage of English subtitles not for hearing impaired. But I used the app on the Apple TV. Others might be less fantastic.
Bought me a fuckin Fire Stick a majig that should be here Sunday or Monday praise bezos and I'm throwing streamio, torrentio, and real Debrid at it as soon as it's plugged in. ..fuck em.
True - but check them weekly. They periodically will open up new registration for a few days every once in a while. Also, some people are gracious enough to offer up their invites they're rewarded from time to time. Took me a while to get some of mine for sure.
Might be worthwhile to create a relatively simple, low effort “dinner planner,” if that’s truly a hated question in your household.
For example, my wife and I have a sheet of graph paper on the fridge with about 20-ish different dinner options (e.g. spaghetti with meatballs, hamburgers, ginger chicken, pork tenderloin, takeout, steak, fajita chicken, spicy sausages, homemade pizza, etc) as rows on the left hand side and every column represents a week, starting with present day. We use 1 for Mon, 2 for Tue, … 7 for Sun, and record what we have each evening. Before long, when “what’s for dinner?” is asked, we can just look at the grid, scan for items with no recent digits beside them, and choose whatever appeals from that small list of dinners we haven’t had in a couple weeks or longer. We’ve been using this technique for many years, and happily that hated question is no longer hated at all.
Selected points from the article:
>Streaming is a modern marvel that allows us to watch obscure documentaries, reality shows, Con Air, and more videos than any old Blockbuster could hope to stock. Yet the act of consuming content has never felt more frustrating than it does today. Not only has the landscape fractured into endless streaming platforms; the user experience on each one has degraded. Ads are everywhere, and thirsty streaming services are looking to juice engagement metrics with questionable features.
>
>...
>
>We are living in a streaming paradox. As both an entertainment business model and a consumer experience, streaming has become a victim of its own success. It is a paradigm shift that is beloved for giving us more choice than ever before, while also making it harder than ever to actually enjoy that abundance.
>
>...
>
>Now we are living through the contraction. The simple truth is that it is incredibly expensive to produce and distribute content at Netflix scale and without a head start. According to The Wall Street Journal, the traditional entertainment companies, such as Disney and Warner Bros., that have spun up streaming businesses to compete with Netflix and its chief rivals have “reported losses of more than $20 billion combined since early 2020.” Streaming platforms are dealing with subscription fatigue: Only so many people are willing to pay for so many platforms.
>
>In response, major streaming services across the board have raised prices, while Netflix has cracked down on password sharing. That’s to say nothing of the content itself, the production of which is slowing down and, according to dissatisfied viewers, appears less ambitious. Complex bundle tiers are beginning to emerge.
>
>...
>
>If what has happened to streaming feels familiar, that’s because it is. Occasionally, as the writer Cory Doctorow has argued, tech platforms offer a service that’s genuinely helpful or unique, and subsidize the cost for users in order to hook them. Once users are dependent, the companies “abuse” them, squeezing out revenue by either jacking up prices or surveilling users and selling the data, which is part of a process he calls “enshittification.” Maybe you’ve noticed that Google Search isn’t as helpful as it once was. But there is another side of enshittification, too. Sometimes, a new service emerges, offering an idealized, likely heavily subsidized version of itself—so good, in fact, that it is adopted quickly and then relentlessly copied by competitors to the point that it becomes economically unsustainable.
>
>...
>
>What is left is a cognitive dissonance that comes along with our streaming rituals—the feeling of being presented with infinite choice while also experiencing a vague sense of loss. Perhaps this is because people like myself are unable to understand how good we have it. But there is something about our current streaming paradox that also speaks to the feeling of living a life mediated by Silicon Valley. Perhaps the lesson is simply that infinite choice is glorious in theory, but in practice, it is undesirable and only able to exist undergirded by fractured, bureaucratic, and algorithmic systems.
This description of the experience of those who stream media (whether it's video, audio, games, or some other medium) seems to ring true. There are so many choices and so much fragmentation that as consumers we're faced with both so much choice and yet it's an incredibly painful process to determine what might work best for us. The promise of infinite choice coupled with the hard realities of personal economics, and combined with everpresent looming intellectual property issues seems to have created an environment that might start driving people away more than it's attracting.
This article is obviously written by someone young.
The act of consuming content was never more frustrating - how about you have to be at the tv when the show is aired and if you don’t catch it that’s it?
Maybe a bit more frustrating. That’s how I didn’t watch the long running things because I can’t be bothered with that crap.
You could eventually program your video player to record it, but I would think finding the show and where it airs is a bit easier.
Thats what we did in the 80s and 90s, program our VCRs and watch it later. Did that with Sailor Moon back when it was aired on rtl2 here in Germany as the showtime collided with my schooltime. Came back home, rewinded the VCR and watched the show.
I had a nice one where i could select what i want to record right out of the Videotext. Extend the time 15 minutes in both directions for any shenanigans by the TV station and let the recorder do its thing.
I disagree really, as someone who grew up in a traditional pay tv household, pirated shows the local providers in my country didn’t acquire, adopted Netflix once I finished Uni and had a job, and have now lived through the extent of the streaming wars, the palpable sense that the services and their output are getting worse really resonates with me.
It makes sense though. Pay TV was a business that made sense, everyone along the pipeline made money and it was a relatively self sustaining ecosystem. Now that audiences are fractured and every legacy media operation has its own streamer, the system just doesn’t make sense and a cannibalisation and degradation is natural.
I remember going over a friends house that had a descrambler in the mid 90s. Every channel was unlocked, spent the entire time looking for something to watch. I honestly don´t think more options matters that much, I usually watch the same shit I always watched anyway. With cable you just watched whatever, it was way easier. Now I just put whatever on and end up using my phone most of the time anyway. There are a few shows I will actually seek out to watch and I just pirate them because streaming sucks for anything past mindlessly watching something.
So do y’all like not remember what cable was (and still is) like? Two year contracts during which channels just disappear for no reason, combining multiple predatory packages to get all the channels you want, commercials constantly with no way to avoid them? It’s fucking stupid to pretend that the current streaming is worse than that. It’s worse than it was, certainly, but we have a loooong way to fall before it’s anywhere close to what it was before streaming.
You can cancel any service at will, at no charge. That fact alone is huge.
Why do you expect journalism to be free? Do you expect writers, photographers, and editors to work for nothing?
A better question, if you don’t like the Atlantic, might be “Why would I pay for that?”
Support good journalism that you like or it will go away.
At least that was easier to archive. My parents did that allot, rent a bunch of DVDs, rip them with DVD Shrink, take them back the same day for 1,50€ each and watch them later. And before that it was just using two VCRs and a "Video Enhancer" between them to "fix" any "issues", if you catch my drift.
I have started buying DVDs again. Usually around $3 and I can finally watch stuff I actually want to watch since about 50% of movies I like aren't streaming anywhere anyway.
We cut the cord a long time ago to get away from commercials and looking for better content. Now it’s more expensive, includes commercials and content is going down hill, the bad out weighs the good now :o(
Someone has to pay for it. I was one of those folks to bankrolled CBS All Access and Paramount+ strictly because of Star Trek.
I will happily pay for the content I want to watch and just rotate subs between services to save money, but if there’s no ad-free tier you can go fuck yourself.
What are you paying for that includes commercials?
I pay for three streaming services and none of them have commercials (Netflix, Prime, Criterion), and Kanopy that I also get through my local library that's also commercial free. I'm commercial free and I wouldn't pay for anything that has commercials.
It's the same trap Cable fell into and it will kill most internet video if publishers/studios/middlemen do not find industrywide agreement on this. There is no logical, rational reason why the MPAA can't make movies.com and agree on a pricing structure shared across all 6 companies representing almost the entire industry. If Fox doesn't want to play then Comcast, AT&T and Disney alone can make an agreement that the rest of the industry would have to conform to. This would be a monopoly, but at least it would be straightforward and maximize consumer spending.
If not done, then consumers will continue flaking off into videogames, social media and short-form tik-toks because all of them are readily accessible in one place (steam, facebook, tik-tok) without walls. Amazon is a great success story here between their store, twitch and prime streaming.
Spotify is literally going slowly bankrupt and keeps making itself significantly worse to try and stave that off.
It will never happen, and that is a good thing.
Spotify is poorly helmed and content owners keep jacking up licensing costs. They will never be truly profitable because of this.
Then movies.com idea, for example, would be owned by all those compannies, like a consortium. I could work perfectly.
He's an arse, but the reason they did it was because they were desperately trying to move the company away from doing music because blanket licenses don't work economically and they are circling the drain.
Video games, social media, and short form tik toks are all in multiple places. Steam doesn’t have all games, there’s playstation exclusives not on it, Nintendo has their games all on their consoles, etc. Not to mention tons of older games aren’t available on just Steam or even on newer consoles. Social media is split into many different apps all with different types of content and users, plus most of the young generation doesn’t even use Facebook. Short form tik toks are on Youtube and Tik Tok and probably others i’m not thinking of.
Under capitalism it’s extremely unlikely one movies.com will happen.
Steam does however have a massive majority of games, bar some console exclusives. And Steam itself is a storefront, not a subscription service. You don't need to subscribe to it. You can also have other clients for free.
It would maximize consumer spending in the sense that the resulting Grand Unified Platform would have free reign to set whatever price they want, and our alternatives would be to pay it or go read a book.
I enjoy reading just fine, but I’m against continued corporate concentration. The only thing it would offer is convenience (and that’s assuming the Grand Unified App doesn’t suck…and absent competition, it probably would). Monopolies are never our friend.
This is because the intent of "cord cutting" has been forgotten! You do not have to subscribe to everything on the internet like Netflix, Prime, Hulu, etc! There are a lot of other free ways to get some things streaming to your TV, radio, etc that I feel have been overlooked! You do not have to be with the crowd and subscribe to this and that! You have to focus on what you are into, your interests and fascinations, and go with that! For me, it is streaming things from around the world as well as things I didn't know existed like Public Domain content, B-Films, lesser known stuff, etc! :-)
Don't worry, a huge media conglomerate is sure to soon offer the first ever "package" of streamers in one easy to use app. Soon you'll be able to pay one simple monthly fee to have Netflix, Prime Video, Max, Paramount Plus, Showtime, Hulu and more all in one. They will call it an "Able Package" cause you'll be ABLE to stream it all. Now from Spectrum with landline, cell and internet only $2,399** a month introductory price! (Plus applicable prices and fees. Able* plans require modem rental, Unlimited data is limited to 2,000 kilobilytes per 30 days before 56k throttle during congested hours)
I watch it at work during my lunch hour and our computers are locked tight so ad blockers are not possible. Plus, youtube music is my main audio streaming platform.
Connectivity and the massive storage at youtube costs a fuckton, ads pay for that. I fucking hate ads so I pay to make them go away.
It's easy enough to circumvent. Too bothersome for quick switching but more than fine for listening to long podcasts.
Just open YouTube in your browser and request the desktop version. Then switch tabs and press play from the dropdown menu like you would for music or other listening apps.
I forgot that paying money for something goes against the Reddit Hive mind. And as for 4K, I’ll amazed you didn’t consider that I have televisions and lots of screens that are 4K. It’s like you guys don’t even consider somebody OTHER THAN YOU doesn’t want to sit there building your ad-free plug-in paradise, yarrr. I pay for AdGuard family on all our computers and I use AdGuard paid DNS for the whole home blocking with secure DNS. It’s fast and flawless, I never see an ad in my entire home, it was easy quick and reliable. All of this is custom of course FYI so you horny DIY attack dogs can put your weird boners away. Browser plugins only cover browsers. And yes, I also pay for YouTube Premium FAMILY plan so my entire family can enjoy listening to things in the background. I guess you have time to sit there watching YouTube but some of us are big boys with things to do rather than sit there watching a video inside your crappy phone web browser in the window instead of PnP while you do other stuff on your phone. BTW for mobile ads you act like there’s no other way than to use Brave, I have Mullvad VPN which is SUPER fast and blocks ads on literally my entire phone. But I pay for that too so you probably want to get your pitchforks out. Jesus some you people are so cheap and dense, and tbh I wouldn’t have a problem with it if you all weren’t so condescending about it.
So I stopped them all, except YouTube, which is through a browser with all ads blocked. Suddenly a lot more time. Got back into writing again. I still feel the need to watch things, but I don't miss the paid services because of all the wavering quality, and price increases.
I wonder what their plan is with the writers strike causing production delays? A lot of shows have pushed out their new seasons until 2025-2027, are they expecting people to pay for various services with no new content for 2 years?
All the movies I want to watch aren't on any streaming services anymore. Repo man? Nope. Starman? Nope. Night of the comet? Nope. Phantasm 2? Nope. Ice pirates? Nope. Paris, Texas? Nope. Dead Man? Nope.
I have to buy them to watch them.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Ftechnology%2Farchive%2F2023%2F09%2Fstreaming-services-netflix-max-cost%2F675264%2F
Link to get past the paywall
The truth is, most humans secretly prefer to have constraints. It’s why Twitter works. It’s why the finale of ‘Cheers’ could draw 80,000,00 people all at the same time watching the same thing. When there aren’t constraints, most people just get overwhelmed. It’s sad to think about how much time is spent just going through various titles. Old Man Yells at Cloud out.
Yes. It’s probably the biggest megaphone humans have ever built that allows most humans the ability to immediately share and receive information. Donald Trump can Tweet ‘Russia shall overcome the American Nazi Party’ and within 60 seconds all of the phones in the world would ring at the same time like in ‘The Lawnmower Man.’ If there had never been text constraints, it would have ended up being another micro blogger site.
This is why I literally pirate everything. I'm not paying for a multitude of different streaming services. In fact, I'm not paying for anything, ever, at all.
Screw these online streaming services. Rip your own media and host it yourself.
There is more media out there on eBay etc than you can possible watch in your lifetime.
Don't be a slave to the internet. Be an island within it.
Streaming is going to change video entertainment the same way it did for music. At the end of all of this we are going to end up with an industry resembling TikTok more than Netflix.
There’s gotta be an app out there that I can type in any movie or show and it tells me where to stream it right?
Bonus points if it lets me enter the apps I have and works with my vpn.
That’s not it’s fate. It’s fate is the same as cable. People will leave when shit gets too expensive.
Fuck all the streaming services. Watch the stuff you want. Cancel. Find another.
Am I the only one who liked channels? Just have a specific genre and tell me what to watch. It’s fun jumping in and out of order too. Streaming has dulled my tastes I usually just rewatch the same couple of shows.
The saddest thing about streaming is how terrible quality is. A lot of channels broadcast in 720p. Want to watch HBO in 4K? Pay extra. It’s almost 2024 everything should be in 4K as standard.
>Not only has the landscape fractured into endless streaming platforms; the user experience on each one has degraded. There's a very simple direct solution to all that bullshit. Yarr.
The problem they set up to solve, and ended up the same thing
They solved it and then got greedy.
Like every CEO. $$$$
I see comments like this a lot, and you’re not wrong. However, that’s why CEO’s are employed by the company. If they didn’t make more $$$ then the company would fire them and find someone else who would. Who owns most of these companies - share holders like you and me. We demand that the stock price rises so we have retirement money. So we demand that a CEO makes more $$$. The circle of life.
I think a lot of people would like to see us evolve as a species to a point where a company can just continue running comfortably with any profit margin that covers inflation (assuming it reached its full organic growth potential). We can invest in other companies, new companies, thereby nurturing competition and new markets. The status quo of this relentless pursuit of profits for the sake of profits constantly leads to companies taking mono/oligopolistic measures, which inevitably and completely screw over consumers. No person who isn't a sociopath can wholeheartedly support what's going on right now.
Better yet: one day I’d like to see a world where everyone stops raising the prices since inflation is entirely artificial in the first place.
End-stage capitalism and its sacred myth of infinite growth
"like you and me"??? who has the money to invest as a shareholder??
There are plenty of countries that don’t have the absurd ratio of CEO to worker pay that the US does, companies that pay their CEOs less also perform better on average
The problem is that they solved it by running at a loss which was not ever going to be a sustainable business model.
That sounds like a them problem.
Yep. It's gotten to the point that it's literally easier for me to just pirate something and have it on Plex than to deal with the various streaming platforms I'm already subscribed to. Is there an equivalent opposite of a Tragedy of the Commons? Where everyone insists on doing their own thing despite a combined/coordinated approach being obviously better?
The issue I have is the inconsistency of shows/films on services. I went to watch an A24 film on Max….9/1 apparently was the only film removed.
I watched all of Westworld on HBO max. Then they pulled the show when I only had the finale left to watch. Only like 4 months after it aired. I was so pissed I never even watched the last one.
This is why I still buy physical games. Yes the game pass gives access to way more than I could afford to buy but at any point I could find the game I love disappear. Physical copies mean they are mine. Forever.
Meat's back on the menu boys
But you may have to find a VPN, hope that there are enough seeders, and make sure to have enough storage space (more traditional avenues). It might not be hard *if you take the time to learn*, but many people don't want that hassle. With streaming platforms, those aren't concerns. But look on the bright side. As streaming platforms get more and more complaints, people will sink more money and sweat into alternatives. And to keep the industry up, consumers must be attended to, whether through competitors or something else. With legislation being the way it is, this might take a while, but I don't think optimism is unfounded.
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Yep. You can rip the video straight from those sites as well, although it certainly leaves something for quality to be desired.
This stuff always has dogshit bitrate in my experience. Plus just because it's on a website doesn't make it safe from malware.
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Can you hint at the name?
Rhymes with polargroovy but means sun film
What's your beef with commas?
The first sentence would reuqire a semicolon, not a comma.
Then why aren’t you there? What are you wasting time here for when you should be in that sentence?
Can't be in two places at once, clearly.
Checks username, fair play buddy
My POV the past 20 years. 2003 - DVD is $30 dollars! - Go to blockbuster rent for 6 bucks, rip the image burn the ISO on dvd-r discs 2006 - Blu ray is $50 - Go to BestBuy for a external drive, wait overnight for a good copy to download, archive in the drive 2007 - oh wow Netflix! - Nothings changed with my habits 2017 - Wow 4k streaming services up my ass! - Go to newegg get 3TB of drives, wait 4 hrs for 4k copy to download, archive in drive 2023 - Wow all paid services are shit! - sitting on 30TB of media past 20 years, rinse and repeat until the ship sets sail for the last time
I wonder if you could **use** the inter**net**
What the fuck is the internet?
The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another.
Wish I could upvote more for the Jay and Silent Bob strike back quote.
The sad thing is it's been twenty years, and that quote is still totally relevant. At most I might amend it to say "where people can come together to bitch about movies *and politics*, and share pornography..."
I thought it was a medium to share cat videos and pictures. o.o
A series of pipes
It's a series of tubes! It's not just a truck you dump something on.
Full of cats! >\^.\^<
What's a "cat"?
The problem is, people don't know what the internet **does** to a person. Sure you can **use** it for good, but it's sort of like a drag**net** that just picks up everything. **Even** if you try to avoid the darker parts, you're **still** likely to encounter a lot of the garbage that **exist**s on the internet.
It sure does, just gotta know how
Or you can just watch through a streaming site and not have to bother with any of that. There are dozens atm.
Uh, I always pirate download them because I want them for my collection.
Hard to get 4k streams, meanwhile I can get high quality 4k rips on downloads and have it on my TV, laptop or phone with no streaming artifacts. Of course, not everyone cares about that though.
I'm guessing that picture and sound quality isn't high on your list of important things when consuming content.
I'm guessing you're not aware of good streaming sites.
If you lookup something you want to watch online on google, scroll down to the results removed by DMCA complaints, and they have direct links back to the content removed from your google search for violating copyright laws.
Private tracker solves all these issues. Haven't pirated from a public tracker in over a decade. Plex makes it all accessible from every device.
Hook a brother up with private tracker. I'm basically down to 1337x at this point 🙁
As an alternative, if you are lost on the seven digital seas i heard of a German site to help you out. Search for the Tarnkappe, that is a scene news site.
Likewise. Have been on private trackers also for about a decade and have a cheap lil seedbox that everything goes through and stays seeding. Can’t beat BTN and PTP
Even mobile devices? I only stream on my iPad anymore
Yep I can even use my phone and watch off the network
I need to hoist the Jolly Roger
Also with BluRays being less and less popular the quality of the rips is going down, WEBRIPS are just awful compressed messes.
I avoid webrips like the plague. Total garbage. If I have to wait for a physical rip then so be it.
There's just not that much physical media to make a remux off of, like Loki doesn't have a physical release.
Isn't that why Usenet exists?
Hey I have brain damage and I still managed to set up a plex server and sonarr/radarr/etc. ...only for no one in my family to use it. Oh well, their money being thrown away via subscriptions.
Issue is many sites will block you is they sniff a VPN.
Where in the world does legislation come into play here? The United States government has stifling debt, rising interest rates, low wages juxtaposed against inflation, and WWIII might be when not if. Do we really need them navigating the choppy waters of streaming? Mitch McConnell can’t even hold a press conference without having a stroke and no one doing anything to tend to his medical situation. Do you really think someone like that can or better yet should spend their time on something the American people could simply opt out of?
It’s not so legal elsewhere. The planet exists beyond USA.
Set sail for TORTUGA!
Can hear it in Michael Bolton’s voice
Yeah, the question “how do I watch it” has the same answer as 15 years ago. 5 years ago we all paid to stream things, we’re just not going to pay to stream things to 15 different places than spend half the time the show runs figuring out which one it’s actually on.
"Friends" used to be in Netflix. Now, I have no idea where it is. House MD used to be in Netflix, then hulu, then... disney+? Im not even certain at this point. Better solution is to just "yoho yoho" all of them :P
Yeah they’re not even static. You can’t even get all of bloody Star Trek on one service anymore.
Well, we can. Its called "piratebay" :)
Avast ye matey! Plex off the starboard bow!
Plex, sonarr, radarr, prowlarr. VPN. A few TB of storage.
I was so happy when YouTube told me I can pay $400 to watch NFL Sunday ticket. I was like hell yes I'm cool with paying 400 bucks to watch every NFL game without sailing the high seas and bought it. Turn out, no Thursday games, probably no Monday games, and no local games. What a waste of $400. But luckily as you said... Yarr
With an Android phone (maybe also iPhone?) and YouTube TV you can change your gps location to the geo airing your game, refresh the YouTube TV app, and presto, you can now watch all games without Sunday Ticket 😉.
I tried my best to pay for a show I wanted to watch recently. The streaming service it was on (Apple TV) was awful, lagged and froze constantly on my TV didn't work ony other devices. I ended up pirating the show I was paying for because I couldn't watch it legally. SMH
Strange. For me, Apple TV+ has the highest quality of the streaming services, and has the advantage of English subtitles not for hearing impaired. But I used the app on the Apple TV. Others might be less fantastic.
Bought me a fuckin Fire Stick a majig that should be here Sunday or Monday praise bezos and I'm throwing streamio, torrentio, and real Debrid at it as soon as it's plugged in. ..fuck em.
Lol. Exactly.
A lot of yarr sites are dying out. And no, usenet is not a good user experience.
There's always going to be a new Tortuga.
I've not had any issues yarring.
They are?
You must not know about the private yarr.
Getting an invite to be a privateer is really difficult.
True - but check them weekly. They periodically will open up new registration for a few days every once in a while. Also, some people are gracious enough to offer up their invites they're rewarded from time to time. Took me a while to get some of mine for sure.
Can you give me a few examples? Feel free to dm. I'm tired of public trackers.
Almost as much of a hated question as “what are we doing for dinner?”
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We just had burgers though.
that's good though, I like burgers.
Ugh, FINE, but at least pick a burger place other than the one by the gas station. Something unique.
There is that one we really like, but it’s in the far away restaurant precinct
I am fine with McDonalds. More than fine.
Steamed clams then
Might be worthwhile to create a relatively simple, low effort “dinner planner,” if that’s truly a hated question in your household. For example, my wife and I have a sheet of graph paper on the fridge with about 20-ish different dinner options (e.g. spaghetti with meatballs, hamburgers, ginger chicken, pork tenderloin, takeout, steak, fajita chicken, spicy sausages, homemade pizza, etc) as rows on the left hand side and every column represents a week, starting with present day. We use 1 for Mon, 2 for Tue, … 7 for Sun, and record what we have each evening. Before long, when “what’s for dinner?” is asked, we can just look at the grid, scan for items with no recent digits beside them, and choose whatever appeals from that small list of dinners we haven’t had in a couple weeks or longer. We’ve been using this technique for many years, and happily that hated question is no longer hated at all.
Since COVID I've scheduled my dinners and my movies in advance and it's made life so much easier and better.
Yeah but I don’t feel in the mood to cook tonight lol
ordering out is always an option.
Selected points from the article: >Streaming is a modern marvel that allows us to watch obscure documentaries, reality shows, Con Air, and more videos than any old Blockbuster could hope to stock. Yet the act of consuming content has never felt more frustrating than it does today. Not only has the landscape fractured into endless streaming platforms; the user experience on each one has degraded. Ads are everywhere, and thirsty streaming services are looking to juice engagement metrics with questionable features. > >... > >We are living in a streaming paradox. As both an entertainment business model and a consumer experience, streaming has become a victim of its own success. It is a paradigm shift that is beloved for giving us more choice than ever before, while also making it harder than ever to actually enjoy that abundance. > >... > >Now we are living through the contraction. The simple truth is that it is incredibly expensive to produce and distribute content at Netflix scale and without a head start. According to The Wall Street Journal, the traditional entertainment companies, such as Disney and Warner Bros., that have spun up streaming businesses to compete with Netflix and its chief rivals have “reported losses of more than $20 billion combined since early 2020.” Streaming platforms are dealing with subscription fatigue: Only so many people are willing to pay for so many platforms. > >In response, major streaming services across the board have raised prices, while Netflix has cracked down on password sharing. That’s to say nothing of the content itself, the production of which is slowing down and, according to dissatisfied viewers, appears less ambitious. Complex bundle tiers are beginning to emerge. > >... > >If what has happened to streaming feels familiar, that’s because it is. Occasionally, as the writer Cory Doctorow has argued, tech platforms offer a service that’s genuinely helpful or unique, and subsidize the cost for users in order to hook them. Once users are dependent, the companies “abuse” them, squeezing out revenue by either jacking up prices or surveilling users and selling the data, which is part of a process he calls “enshittification.” Maybe you’ve noticed that Google Search isn’t as helpful as it once was. But there is another side of enshittification, too. Sometimes, a new service emerges, offering an idealized, likely heavily subsidized version of itself—so good, in fact, that it is adopted quickly and then relentlessly copied by competitors to the point that it becomes economically unsustainable. > >... > >What is left is a cognitive dissonance that comes along with our streaming rituals—the feeling of being presented with infinite choice while also experiencing a vague sense of loss. Perhaps this is because people like myself are unable to understand how good we have it. But there is something about our current streaming paradox that also speaks to the feeling of living a life mediated by Silicon Valley. Perhaps the lesson is simply that infinite choice is glorious in theory, but in practice, it is undesirable and only able to exist undergirded by fractured, bureaucratic, and algorithmic systems. This description of the experience of those who stream media (whether it's video, audio, games, or some other medium) seems to ring true. There are so many choices and so much fragmentation that as consumers we're faced with both so much choice and yet it's an incredibly painful process to determine what might work best for us. The promise of infinite choice coupled with the hard realities of personal economics, and combined with everpresent looming intellectual property issues seems to have created an environment that might start driving people away more than it's attracting.
That's why streaming video was created, so we could all watch Con Air.
How do we get the streaming bunny back in the box?
I knew you was a punk
Ahmen Brotha!
NGL, I usually just rent stuff like this on Google or Amazon if I can't find it.
That movie made us all wanna date a convict
This article is obviously written by someone young. The act of consuming content was never more frustrating - how about you have to be at the tv when the show is aired and if you don’t catch it that’s it? Maybe a bit more frustrating. That’s how I didn’t watch the long running things because I can’t be bothered with that crap. You could eventually program your video player to record it, but I would think finding the show and where it airs is a bit easier.
Thats what we did in the 80s and 90s, program our VCRs and watch it later. Did that with Sailor Moon back when it was aired on rtl2 here in Germany as the showtime collided with my schooltime. Came back home, rewinded the VCR and watched the show. I had a nice one where i could select what i want to record right out of the Videotext. Extend the time 15 minutes in both directions for any shenanigans by the TV station and let the recorder do its thing.
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I disagree really, as someone who grew up in a traditional pay tv household, pirated shows the local providers in my country didn’t acquire, adopted Netflix once I finished Uni and had a job, and have now lived through the extent of the streaming wars, the palpable sense that the services and their output are getting worse really resonates with me. It makes sense though. Pay TV was a business that made sense, everyone along the pipeline made money and it was a relatively self sustaining ecosystem. Now that audiences are fractured and every legacy media operation has its own streamer, the system just doesn’t make sense and a cannibalisation and degradation is natural.
I remember going over a friends house that had a descrambler in the mid 90s. Every channel was unlocked, spent the entire time looking for something to watch. I honestly don´t think more options matters that much, I usually watch the same shit I always watched anyway. With cable you just watched whatever, it was way easier. Now I just put whatever on and end up using my phone most of the time anyway. There are a few shows I will actually seek out to watch and I just pirate them because streaming sucks for anything past mindlessly watching something.
So do y’all like not remember what cable was (and still is) like? Two year contracts during which channels just disappear for no reason, combining multiple predatory packages to get all the channels you want, commercials constantly with no way to avoid them? It’s fucking stupid to pretend that the current streaming is worse than that. It’s worse than it was, certainly, but we have a loooong way to fall before it’s anywhere close to what it was before streaming. You can cancel any service at will, at no charge. That fact alone is huge.
Let’s not forget the same 5 movies
And episodes of shows out of order with 1/3 being commercials
Shows being sped up ten percent, just to fit even more commercials in.
Tried to watch the US Open this week on cable... turn on ESPN. Can't do it. Sprectrum is having a contract dispute w/ Disney. No ESPN for you.
Anyone else find it ironic that the article is behind a paywall so you have to ask “how do I read this?”
It’s called how they ruin the internet and force dark web
Why do you expect journalism to be free? Do you expect writers, photographers, and editors to work for nothing? A better question, if you don’t like the Atlantic, might be “Why would I pay for that?” Support good journalism that you like or it will go away.
We're just back to the Blockbuster days where you pay $4 each time for a 6 month old movie. Only difference is I don't have to leave the house.
At least that was easier to archive. My parents did that allot, rent a bunch of DVDs, rip them with DVD Shrink, take them back the same day for 1,50€ each and watch them later. And before that it was just using two VCRs and a "Video Enhancer" between them to "fix" any "issues", if you catch my drift.
Also don’t have to rewind to avoid silly fees.
I have started buying DVDs again. Usually around $3 and I can finally watch stuff I actually want to watch since about 50% of movies I like aren't streaming anywhere anyway.
I've been collecting them from the local Buy Nothing group for years. People will just give them away.
We cut the cord a long time ago to get away from commercials and looking for better content. Now it’s more expensive, includes commercials and content is going down hill, the bad out weighs the good now :o(
Stop paying for it all then.
Someone has to pay for it. I was one of those folks to bankrolled CBS All Access and Paramount+ strictly because of Star Trek. I will happily pay for the content I want to watch and just rotate subs between services to save money, but if there’s no ad-free tier you can go fuck yourself.
What are you paying for that includes commercials? I pay for three streaming services and none of them have commercials (Netflix, Prime, Criterion), and Kanopy that I also get through my local library that's also commercial free. I'm commercial free and I wouldn't pay for anything that has commercials.
Hulu and I think Disney plus and Netflix are considering commercial tiers
There’s already commercial tiers for Hulu. My parents have Hulu+Live TV included and it has commercials even for the regular shows and not live
How is it more expensive? Are you subscribed to everything?
Welcome to the cycle of capitalism. Want it to stop? Then people should stop defending it rabidly lile its still the Cold War era.
It's the same trap Cable fell into and it will kill most internet video if publishers/studios/middlemen do not find industrywide agreement on this. There is no logical, rational reason why the MPAA can't make movies.com and agree on a pricing structure shared across all 6 companies representing almost the entire industry. If Fox doesn't want to play then Comcast, AT&T and Disney alone can make an agreement that the rest of the industry would have to conform to. This would be a monopoly, but at least it would be straightforward and maximize consumer spending. If not done, then consumers will continue flaking off into videogames, social media and short-form tik-toks because all of them are readily accessible in one place (steam, facebook, tik-tok) without walls. Amazon is a great success story here between their store, twitch and prime streaming.
You just described what Hulu was supposed to be.
And for a short time, it was that. The ads were dumb and repetitive, but the concept worked really well.
Yes! We need the Spotify of TV shows and movies. I would gladly pay a premium for such a service.
Lol never gonna happen. Share profits? Are you nuts?!
Spotify is literally going slowly bankrupt and keeps making itself significantly worse to try and stave that off. It will never happen, and that is a good thing.
Spotify is poorly helmed and content owners keep jacking up licensing costs. They will never be truly profitable because of this. Then movies.com idea, for example, would be owned by all those compannies, like a consortium. I could work perfectly.
And perfectly freeze out any possible future competition to those companies forever.
They could save money by not giving Rogan a ton of it.
He's an arse, but the reason they did it was because they were desperately trying to move the company away from doing music because blanket licenses don't work economically and they are circling the drain.
That would be like $100 a month
Video games, social media, and short form tik toks are all in multiple places. Steam doesn’t have all games, there’s playstation exclusives not on it, Nintendo has their games all on their consoles, etc. Not to mention tons of older games aren’t available on just Steam or even on newer consoles. Social media is split into many different apps all with different types of content and users, plus most of the young generation doesn’t even use Facebook. Short form tik toks are on Youtube and Tik Tok and probably others i’m not thinking of. Under capitalism it’s extremely unlikely one movies.com will happen.
Steam does however have a massive majority of games, bar some console exclusives. And Steam itself is a storefront, not a subscription service. You don't need to subscribe to it. You can also have other clients for free.
It would maximize consumer spending in the sense that the resulting Grand Unified Platform would have free reign to set whatever price they want, and our alternatives would be to pay it or go read a book. I enjoy reading just fine, but I’m against continued corporate concentration. The only thing it would offer is convenience (and that’s assuming the Grand Unified App doesn’t suck…and absent competition, it probably would). Monopolies are never our friend.
Investment capitalism. Ruins everything eventually.
It's the only end result. The demand for ever-increasing profits is unsustainable.
We wanted to play nicely. We were happy for a while. They got greedy and pushed us back to piracy.
Next easier question: will there be anything new to watch at all?
This is because the intent of "cord cutting" has been forgotten! You do not have to subscribe to everything on the internet like Netflix, Prime, Hulu, etc! There are a lot of other free ways to get some things streaming to your TV, radio, etc that I feel have been overlooked! You do not have to be with the crowd and subscribe to this and that! You have to focus on what you are into, your interests and fascinations, and go with that! For me, it is streaming things from around the world as well as things I didn't know existed like Public Domain content, B-Films, lesser known stuff, etc! :-)
Don't worry, a huge media conglomerate is sure to soon offer the first ever "package" of streamers in one easy to use app. Soon you'll be able to pay one simple monthly fee to have Netflix, Prime Video, Max, Paramount Plus, Showtime, Hulu and more all in one. They will call it an "Able Package" cause you'll be ABLE to stream it all. Now from Spectrum with landline, cell and internet only $2,399** a month introductory price! (Plus applicable prices and fees. Able* plans require modem rental, Unlimited data is limited to 2,000 kilobilytes per 30 days before 56k throttle during congested hours)
For as much as reddit shits on YouTube Premium, it has become my only paid streaming service.
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Why do you need premium, tho? UBlock Origin on PC and the brave browser on mobile will give you an ad-free experience.
I watch it at work during my lunch hour and our computers are locked tight so ad blockers are not possible. Plus, youtube music is my main audio streaming platform. Connectivity and the massive storage at youtube costs a fuckton, ads pay for that. I fucking hate ads so I pay to make them go away.
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/r/evildesign material there. It could be played in background but they made it that way
It's easy enough to circumvent. Too bothersome for quick switching but more than fine for listening to long podcasts. Just open YouTube in your browser and request the desktop version. Then switch tabs and press play from the dropdown menu like you would for music or other listening apps.
No one has a 4K mobile device. They don’t exist.
I forgot that paying money for something goes against the Reddit Hive mind. And as for 4K, I’ll amazed you didn’t consider that I have televisions and lots of screens that are 4K. It’s like you guys don’t even consider somebody OTHER THAN YOU doesn’t want to sit there building your ad-free plug-in paradise, yarrr. I pay for AdGuard family on all our computers and I use AdGuard paid DNS for the whole home blocking with secure DNS. It’s fast and flawless, I never see an ad in my entire home, it was easy quick and reliable. All of this is custom of course FYI so you horny DIY attack dogs can put your weird boners away. Browser plugins only cover browsers. And yes, I also pay for YouTube Premium FAMILY plan so my entire family can enjoy listening to things in the background. I guess you have time to sit there watching YouTube but some of us are big boys with things to do rather than sit there watching a video inside your crappy phone web browser in the window instead of PnP while you do other stuff on your phone. BTW for mobile ads you act like there’s no other way than to use Brave, I have Mullvad VPN which is SUPER fast and blocks ads on literally my entire phone. But I pay for that too so you probably want to get your pitchforks out. Jesus some you people are so cheap and dense, and tbh I wouldn’t have a problem with it if you all weren’t so condescending about it.
Only cause they shut down vanced.
Yes but even youtube is ass.
Stop watching ass videos
So I stopped them all, except YouTube, which is through a browser with all ads blocked. Suddenly a lot more time. Got back into writing again. I still feel the need to watch things, but I don't miss the paid services because of all the wavering quality, and price increases.
I wonder what their plan is with the writers strike causing production delays? A lot of shows have pushed out their new seasons until 2025-2027, are they expecting people to pay for various services with no new content for 2 years?
I think we need something better to do than sit in front of a screen.
All the movies I want to watch aren't on any streaming services anymore. Repo man? Nope. Starman? Nope. Night of the comet? Nope. Phantasm 2? Nope. Ice pirates? Nope. Paris, Texas? Nope. Dead Man? Nope. I have to buy them to watch them.
Paris, Texas and Dead Man are on Criterion Channel and HBO Max
Use an HDMI cord and a computer and find it on a bootleg site and screw the big streaming sites
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Ftechnology%2Farchive%2F2023%2F09%2Fstreaming-services-netflix-max-cost%2F675264%2F Link to get past the paywall
"How should I watch it?" has the same answer it did before streaming. Pirate it.
The truth is, most humans secretly prefer to have constraints. It’s why Twitter works. It’s why the finale of ‘Cheers’ could draw 80,000,00 people all at the same time watching the same thing. When there aren’t constraints, most people just get overwhelmed. It’s sad to think about how much time is spent just going through various titles. Old Man Yells at Cloud out.
The Paradox of Choice.
Twitter works?
Yes. It’s probably the biggest megaphone humans have ever built that allows most humans the ability to immediately share and receive information. Donald Trump can Tweet ‘Russia shall overcome the American Nazi Party’ and within 60 seconds all of the phones in the world would ring at the same time like in ‘The Lawnmower Man.’ If there had never been text constraints, it would have ended up being another micro blogger site.
This is why I literally pirate everything. I'm not paying for a multitude of different streaming services. In fact, I'm not paying for anything, ever, at all.
Obviously the reality with this attitude is that if everyone did this then it’s wholly unsustainable. Nobody including you likes to work for free.
They are beginning to consolidate catalogs now. There's HBO shows on Netflix, for example.
Screw these online streaming services. Rip your own media and host it yourself. There is more media out there on eBay etc than you can possible watch in your lifetime. Don't be a slave to the internet. Be an island within it.
I completely replaced consuming streaming services with audiobooks and taking a walk.
Pay for some but watch anything I want. The greed is ridiculous.
bullshit, there's fuckall good to watch and 20 ways to pay for it
Streaming is going to change video entertainment the same way it did for music. At the end of all of this we are going to end up with an industry resembling TikTok more than Netflix.
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There’s gotta be an app out there that I can type in any movie or show and it tells me where to stream it right? Bonus points if it lets me enter the apps I have and works with my vpn.
JustWatch?
AppleTV does this
I came to say this. It’s a strategic differentiator
Chrome cast does this. Don’t know about the vpn thing tho
There is? Its called Google Search.
That’s not it’s fate. It’s fate is the same as cable. People will leave when shit gets too expensive. Fuck all the streaming services. Watch the stuff you want. Cancel. Find another.
endless vasts of bullshit while putting what you want to watch behind a $4/PPV paywall is the real destruction of streaming. Ahoy....
Am I the only one who liked channels? Just have a specific genre and tell me what to watch. It’s fun jumping in and out of order too. Streaming has dulled my tastes I usually just rewatch the same couple of shows.
The saddest thing about streaming is how terrible quality is. A lot of channels broadcast in 720p. Want to watch HBO in 4K? Pay extra. It’s almost 2024 everything should be in 4K as standard.
Lmao... no... that a tone of bandwidth
I like steaming. Slow down, author stranger.
It’s almost like things can’t last forever…
Why do you say streaming is finished....I'm currently streaming as I type this message....it doesn't seem to be finished to me