Slashdot Mirror
Why Movie Streaming Services Are Unsatisfying — and Will Stay That Way
mendax sends this excerpt from a New York Times op-ed:
"like Napster in the late 1990s, [torrent-streaming app Popcorn Time] offered a glimpse of what seemed like the future, a model for how painless it should be to stream movies and TV shows online. The app also highlighted something we've all felt when settling in for a night with today’s popular streaming services, whether Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, or Google or Microsoft’s media stores: They just aren't good enough. ... In the music business, Napster’s vision eventually became a reality. Today, with services like Spotify and Rdio, you can pay a monthly fee to listen to whatever you want, whenever you want. But in the movie and TV business, such a glorious future isn't in the offing anytime soon.
According to industry experts, some of whom declined to be quoted on the record because of the sensitivities of the nexus of media deals involved, we aren’t anywhere close to getting a service that allows customers to pay a single monthly fee for access to a wide range of top-notch movies and TV shows.Instead of a single comprehensive service, the future of digital TV and movies is destined to be fragmented across several services, at least for the next few years. We’ll all face a complex decision tree when choosing what to watch, and we’ll have to settle for something less than ideal."
According to industry experts, some of whom declined to be quoted on the record because of the sensitivities of the nexus of media deals involved, we aren’t anywhere close to getting a service that allows customers to pay a single monthly fee for access to a wide range of top-notch movies and TV shows.Instead of a single comprehensive service, the future of digital TV and movies is destined to be fragmented across several services, at least for the next few years. We’ll all face a complex decision tree when choosing what to watch, and we’ll have to settle for something less than ideal."
...we all just use bitTorrent.
The Oak stays strong and the palm tree bends - but with the Hurricane of fed up cord cutters, only one species will survive the storm.
I'm patient.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Harking back to a few articles ago, about the inconvenience of DVDs. /movie to stream any video I want whenever I want?
I can walk into a physical store 2 miles from my house, drop 5 bucks for a movie, and if I bring it back within 24 hrs, I get 4 bucks back.
Why can't I just pay $1
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
How many shares of Netflix do you own exactly?
Torrents+media server+raspbmc meets 100% of my needs.
I have no need for immediate streaming access, and I already have 4tb of media, at least half of which I have yet to watch, and the other half things I will likely rewatch in the future.
law abiding citizens will have to settle for something less than ideal.
FTFY
Netflix is 100% satisfying.
Sure, if you are satisfied by most of the top 200 movies on IMDB not being available there...
Most academy award winners? Not present. ...
Most Oscar winners? Not present.
Most Sundance Film Festival Winners? Not present.
It shouldn't cost more to "rent" a two year old movie to stream online that it does to BUY it in the bargain bin. Not only that, but many older movies aren't available to rent at all, only for "purchase" (which, when bought online is really a long-term rental anyway due to DRM).
Get the rental prices down. Let me pay $2-$3 to watch a movie rather than $6-$10. And for the love of Princess Celestia, when you PAY for content online, it should look good! No compression artifacts, no buffering. Let me pull down the whole thing, or maybe half of it before watching to ensure a good experience.
He is not talking about video quality. At least read the summary. It is true, depending your tastes you usually don't find something specific you want to watch, you have to make do with what's available.
I have not, and will not, use my cable provider's "on demand" service for anything for which I have to pay ($5 - $10 per selection per 24-hour viewing window). If there were some "bundle" price, al la Netflix, I'd give them $10 for access. Of course, I don't pay the obscene fees for "premium" channels, either. I only have one cable box attached to a screen. I cannot watch all three (four?) at the same time, but I would have to pay an additional monthly fee for each one, even if it is discounted slightly for second, third, ... selection.
I may miss something, but nothing I've heard of justifies the pricing.
Although illegal in many countries (but not all), it is satisfying. And free. It doesn't cover everything, but it certainly covers a lot and is expanding from what I can see. I can't help but wonder when TV shows will be added, along with a choice of where to pull the torrents from (it's locked in to YIFY currently though there might be an easy way to change that, I haven't the time).
Although the team that originally started it dropped the project, it was entirely open source so others could (and did) pick up where they left off. They didn't do so due to legal issues (because they checked multiple times to see that what they were doing was indeed legal), but because they didn't want to be in the middle of fighting the paradigm that the film (and other) industries have established.
Here's a link.
Did I just read two stories today, telling me both the problem with DVDs and the problem with streaming services?
Netflix is already delivering.
How did this BUL$4!T get posted?
Netflix is 100% satisfying. WTF back country bullshit throttled cable internet service are you using?
It depends on which country you live in. Netflix do not offer the same in all countries and the lack of content is a serious problem in some countries. It's like the US has cable TV while others are stuck with a regular antenna. I don't use Netflix currently because I have already seen everything I want to see there. I have yet to see anybody from the US making that claim.
I have no evidence to blame netflix for not delivering what they should. From what I have seen, the stream is decent and all problems I have seen/heard of so far turned out to be local wifi issues.
Until "the industry" pulls their heads out of their asses, they're losing revenue.
fuck 'em. They're not too big to fail. Everyone in the world needs to learn to stop giving money to selfish corporations.
Let old media fade away, and then someone smarter than them can buy their back-catalogues, and their studios, and do the right thing.
Meanwhile, Popcorn Time beta 0.2.7 exists right now, and we can live without Transformers 8 while the system crumbles.
they are not selling food. the product is inherently of no value. I say make them sing for their supper. In the end all they are are fools for our entertainment. the idea that they dictate the terms of the price of a non essential good is in the long run just silly
I do watch Netflix but whenever I need to take a movie seriously (I write about films for part of my work) I do have to watch the other non Netflix versions just in case http://whatnetflixdoes.tumblr.... No affiliation with the site by the way
I live in NZ.
We WISH we had netflix. And our only pay-tv option Sky is not on-demand, stupidly expensive per month (even without the movie channels) AND complete shit. Netflix is a dream in comparison and it is 10-20x the price per month!
But do not worry folks, uto(rrent)pia is already upon us.
Here is my message to the movie/TV industry:
Until you get you act together and provide a decent, convenient service comparable to what the US has I will be getting them for free. And I wont feel at all guilty regardless of what any corporate shill says in the media or here on these forums - if you want to be anti-competitive then I simply will not play the game AT ALL.
Netflix doesn't even get rewind right, something my lowly 11 year old TiVo got right on day one. "WTF did he just say?" Hit the instant replay button and jump back 8 seconds. With Netflix it's as if someone there has to get up and change reels any time you want to skip backward.
Sky is 10-20x the amount, not netflix!
Why do you think that HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and Starz (a latecomer, relatively speaking) have all been in existence since the popularity of cable television exploded in the 70s? Because that fragmentation (only allowing one of them rights to a given movie) allows the industry to milk as much money out of consumers as possible. How many people could pay $50 a month back in the 80s for a single channel that carries all movies? Not many. So in essence it was split up into multiple channels, so people could at least subscribe to as little or as much as they could afford.
So of course that backwards, entrenched industry is going to try their hardest to bring that concept to streaming as well.
Better known as 318230.
By netflix paying comcast, they will be forced to pay others and it will grow over time.
They, and others such as Microsoft, should team up with Google's internet service and start installing it everywhere that the monopolies are delivering poor service and playing games with them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
According to industry experts ... we aren't anywhere close to getting a service that allows customers to pay a single monthly fee for access to a wide range of top-notch movies and TV shows.
Just like one service can't provide customers with a wide range of top-notch retail products. Except for Amazon.
I really hate the phrase, but that takes "first world problems" to a new level.
Apple TV
What about it?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
And even if you had netflix, you'd still pirate movies and tv shows. You'd just use a different excuse.
So somewhat irrelevant to the subthread, wouldn't you say?
Why would anyone want to stream something outside of sports?
Because they're already paying for a forced package deal that includes both sports and other programming. It's called cable.
Why would I want that when I could queue something up on a torrent
Lawful services don't run the risk of making their users the next Jammie Thomas.
https://mediahint.com/
you are welcome.
The never-attainable struggle for perfection and certainty is the source of much of human suffering.
Netflix has plenty of shows - you can have a lot of fun watching them. It's a good value. Other shows can be had from other sources.
There are also mountains to climb, people to see, and hungry to feed.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Here. I live in the US and can easily classroom this. I ditched Netflix a month ago after 4 months of subscription because there was hardly any interesting content that I hadn't seen.
I really hate the phrase, but that takes "first world problems" to a new level.
Living in the first world is pretty much defined by not having third and second world problems and #firstworldproblems is a defeatist's wet dream turned to reality.
the product is inherently of no value.
Staying current with popular entertainment may help someone advance in office politics at his workplace and qualifying for a promotion, instead of gaining a reputation as That Guy and qualifying for constructive dismissal.
I don't think Netflix is anywhere near 100% satisfying but it comes pretty close. It's basically a replacement for 30 or so channels on cable that are dominated by re-runs.
However, I think the idea that this has to be some sort of one stop option is bogus and stupid. There's no good reason that multiple services can't do the job. We already have multiple channels in the old model.
Netflix + Amazon(PPV) together is a pretty complete solution.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The music industry has been using the "top X" model for distributing funds for a long time, therefore adding new services to its income base has not been that difficult. What do I mean by this? Radios (your local AM/FM type) pay a fee to broadcast popular music. They don't pay a per-song fee as that would require extensive and expensive book keeping. Rather, portions of their fee are distributed to artists based on where an artists current song is. So if your song gets to #1 on the Billboard charts, you get a bigger slice of the fee from radios than if it is at #40.
For movies, I'm not aware of there being anything similar. Even free to air television license movies and TV shows on a per-asset basis.
For Netflix to offer a $40 all you can eat movies, whatever movie you want, for a month would require a completely new licensing and income distribution model for movies. Given how conservative the business executives in that industry are explains why this hasn't happened. At a guess, there is no capability either within the existing contracts or the people involved to transition the way money is received for movies to mimic that already used for music.
I think one difference is that physical goods are purchased a la carte, unlike monthly subscription streaming services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. Another is the existence of much more mature legislation, case law, and business models around physical goods than around video on demand. Unlike video on demand, physical goods have an exhaustion doctrine allowing resale.
Much of the explanation involving exclusive deals, etc, makes sense (as in I grok it, not that I like it) for recent titles, but what's the explanation for missing back catalog titles, stuff more than 10 years old?
So much of it is DVD only. I can't imagine there's that much of a market for those kinds of titles on DVD to keep them DVD exclusive.
Viacom is about to go dark in 800 markets and 5 million homes because they want to nearly double their rate overnight: http://www.latimes.com/enterta...
And TV wonders why it's dieing. Just like the music industry, TV and Movie studios are vastly overestimating the value of their product.
Netflix is 100% satisfying.
If your tastes are mediocre as yours obviously are, then you are easily satisfied.
But not all of us are philistines like you, and you most certainly do not speak
for the rest of us when you claim Netflix is satisfying.
Anything less than 100% back catalog "so fails to satisfy"? I'm not even going to use that three-letter acronym. Childish.
Interesting, because, to me, most movies that win lots of those awards are either overdone romance dramas or center left political propaganda schlock. Talk about formulaic and dull. They make those teen vampire serial shows passed off as 'science' fiction seem tolerable....for a moment...at a distance. Hell, these people think 'gravity' is good science fiction, so their opinions count for exactly nothing to me.
Sure, if you are satisfied by most of the top 200 movies on IMDB not being available there...
Welcome to living in Canada with the benefit of "Cancon" dictating your movie viewing habits. I should add, it's just like living in any other country that isn't the US...isn't it so nice? Well anyway, netflix is perfectly fine and for someone who cut the cord and wants to watch something and doesn't really give a rats ass about "trendy award winner" it continues to be just fine. Then again, I can't get things like hulu, or amazon, or itunes(the viewing stuff) up here because of "viewership" rules anyway.
Om, nomnomnom...
Too many content executives who are both stupid and greedy.
Not enough bullets.
I am sorry, but I have never heard a good argument to use something other than the Newsgroups I've been using since the early 90's.
Currently I pay $8.00 per month to Astraweb and run NZBGet on a little NAS box with front ends Couchpotato for Movies and Sickbeard for Shows. They are internal web pages running on the NAS and you can set a show and movie you would like to see, set the quality you'd like and forget till you get an email that the job is DONE!
At that point the file is LOCAL so none of that buffering BS!
THAT's the glimpse of the future!!!
I see Netflix stutter at my friends' with relative poor video quality. And who wants a limited/changing/shrinking(?) selection anyways?
Yes, some might say that NG's are 'illegal' but downloading is NOT in many county's.. So don't use bit torrents since that's uploading too, but use NG's instead. Combined with SSL access to super fast servers and retention of over 1500 days what's not to like??
Besides, it NG's have music too... I have never doubted where I want to spend my $8/month
Cheers!
It's taken me some years, but I'm finally bored of Netflix. I just can't find anything else worth watching. My lady is more willing to plumb the depths than I am, but she finishes only about one movie in four, and the rate of watching TV shows is even poorer, though when she watches one episode she tends to watch the entire series. Whereas the list of TV shows I'll watch is basically restricted to cartoons, science fiction, and ow my balls (AKA MXC.) I've watched the cartoons I want to watch and the Anime is streamed in English-only so fuck that, I've long since watched all the sci-fi, they don't show ow my balls, Top Gear can be torrented or sometimes watched on Streetfire if they don't fuck it up.
I guess I'll have to see some people or feed some hungry. Got a bum knee.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If we could buy anything available somewhere in the world for a reasonable price, we wouldn't pirate anything. The artificial restrictions and rent seeking drive discontent. At least Disney figured it out. Releasing Disney movies on VHS once every 10-15 years in special limited editions stopped when every release now is ripped and preserved for posterity.
I rent lots of movies, and "steal" only what isn't available locally at any price.
Learn to love Alaska
It's funny Pirate Bay always has what I want and it downloads quickly and there are no annoying ADs like the disk I "pay" for.
I hate to say this, as much as I sympathize more with Netflix than a major studio, but shouldn't the studios eventually stream their movies themselves? Is the tech really that hard, why are they outsourcing it to Amazon and Netflix?
Like TV channels, we should just surf the studio websites until we find what we want (using Google, perhaps). That seems the inevitable future rather than one or two clearinghouses. That's what tech does: removes the middleman (except when there's a man in the middle ;).
onechannel
I don't use this. I've only heard about it somewhere.
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
Dammit, I knew I'd been doing it wrong! Here I'd been climbing the hungry and feeding the mountains. That explains the restraining order.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Streaming services should be able to stream any content they want for a fixed fee per stream. Content providers should not get to pick and choose who pays them royalties. This way, the competition between streamers would be purely over price and service.
I live in NZ.
We WISH we had netflix.
Use a US DNS service (not a proxy), I live in Australia and that's how I get Hulu even though it technically isn't available here.
I remember when you turned on the TV and watched what was there, or listened to the radio, or played a record, or read a newspaper/book/magazine.
Now people want EVERYTHING! NOW! and it has to be on TV (passive experiences only, please).
Sheesh.
It's taken me some years, but I'm finally bored of Netflix.
I did the 30-day free trial of Netflix in Dec-Jan. I got bored with the choices available before the end of the free trial.
A few good ones surrounded by tons of grade B movies with descriptions that start with "Not to be confused with the recent mega hit..."
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
many anime can be switched to japanese and with english subtitles if you want
How about those "new release" that are on the new release list for months and months?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Netflix is 100% satisfying. WTF back country bullshit throttled cable internet service are you using?
To view cable for me is at least $30 a month, Netflix is $8. I get the local and FOX (The Simpsons) over the air at no cost,
"They just aren’t good enough." there is a bit of truth there. But I'm ok with what's on Netflix just not at a 100% level.
The real problem is that there is very little on TV that's worth watching, no matter WHAT the delivery medium is. Dozens of formulaic "crime" dramas. Dozens of unfunny "situation comedies". Every show tries to copy everything else that was ever PREVIOUSLY successful, but the copy is never even half as good as the original.
NOTHING new on TV is worth watching. And I've already seen all the good reruns.
Netflix is 100% satisfying
Are you a paid shill? I live in Seattle, and I don't know anyone that has enough bandwidth to stream Netflix. HBO to Go, ESPN3, etc. all have the same problem. If we can't do it here in the center of the tech work, there's no damn way Netflix will work in most places in this country. My 640 Kbps with CenturyLink is not nearly fast enough for a good streaming experience.
Most academy award winners? Not present.
Most Oscar winners? Not present.
Those are the same thing.
I use a VPN service specially targeted at Netflix users and I can switch between any of the Netflix regions. In addition, this works in almost all the countries I have been to including Hong Kong, UK, Spain... The content available so far is diverse enough to keep me interested.
Why would I pay for an Apple TV device when I can load XBMC on an old computer and have the same kind of thing for free, or when I can turn on my Blu-Ray player and connect to a lot of other free streams?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This does not work.
What you really need is a US Proxying service that proxies specific URLs.
You can get Netflix with a DNS Proxy service; that uses DNS to selectively proxy certain URLs to defeat the Geoblocking, but NOT proxy the content connections for Netflix. The content is the large amount of data, and doesn't have any direct geoblock associated with it, but getting "access" to the content, requires proxying.
Because you use DNS to perform the redirection, your end users think all they are doing is changing DNS and not being proxied.
Netflix is 100% satisfying. WTF back country bullshit throttled cable internet service are you using?
Netflix is utter crap if you want to watch new movies. It's the reason why I dumped Netflix a year ago. Amazon and Redbox both get new movies much faster and you can stream them. I'll grant you that Netflix does a good job at adding to their impressive old movie collection and they tend to add TV series fairly quickly. They may meet your needs, but there are many of us left wanting.
A combination of Redbox, Amazon Prime, Comcast, and NHL Game Center Live does it for me...
Having a limited selection and paying a small monthly fee in order to avoid commercials which make me ill is very satisfying.
The noise pollution at other people's houses is almost intolerable.
A hybrid DNS/Proxy service can really come in handy. Theoretically you could set it up to route around through different regions for services like Netflix.
*cough* unblock dash *cough* dot com *cough*
Seems that Canadian Winter cold is getting the best of me.
Netflix is 100% satisfying. WTF back country bullshit throttled cable internet service are you using?
Comcast
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I guess I'll have to see some people or feed some hungry. Got a bum knee.
Shitty TV is great background for doing physical therapy. (5 shoulder exercises and 3 knee exercises) x 3 sets x 20 reps each x both sides = one episode of Helix.
There are also mountains to climb, people to see, and hungry to feed.
And women to fuck!
This is why I love the Sony video rental store on the PS3 (YMMV). If I'm looking for a recent movie, I'm much more likely to find it there for rent at about the same as the old Blockbuster price.
>Most academy award winners? Not present. ...
>Most Oscar winners? Not present.
>Most Sundance Film Festival Winners? Not present.
And not a fuck was given. There's more than enough to watch. If a movie maker doesn't want me to see their previous movie, that's their own business. I'm not going out of my way to help them distribute their product to me.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Let's be realistic here, the nexus of media deals that perpetuate the present system are never going to go away in the absence of tough competition, legal or not. Since tough competition cannot come from legal sources, due to the aforementioned cartel arrangements in the Movie, Television, the "last mile" content delivery business (cable, satellite and telecom) and regulatory failure, it must come from outside the cartel as with Napster. If Popcorn time is upgraded to offer some kind of obfuscation or anonymity feature, ala TOR, then the media cartels would be forced to compete because they couldn't shut it down, without shutting down the Internet, and individual users would be difficult or impossible to track down. Popcorn time needs to add Anonymity, if possible, to really challenge the media cartels in the US.
The "future of digital TV and movies is destined to be fragmented across several services" but right now there is one website that has the torrents for them all. I'm not advocating piracy but just saying there are reliable one stop options if you don't mind testing the copyright laws of where you live.
Of course if you happen to live in China, as I currently do, then there is approximately zero legal options for English language movies and TV. Fortunately I have found books are not region locked, yet...
Anime on Netflix is streamed in both japanese subbed and english dubbed. Check your Chromecast/Roku settings (audio track, cc/subtitles). I abhor dubbed anime and I've got 0 complaints with Netflix.
Additionally, I've read that Viz Video is coming to Netflix this year (2014) bringing Ranma (the one anime I prefer dubbed) woot.
[i'm assuming an apple tv/xbox/whatever has these settings, no clue]
Anime on Netflix is streamed in both japanese subbed and english dubbed. Check your Chromecast/Roku settings (audio track, cc/subtitles)
I'm using a Wii most of the time. I don't know if that has anything to do with anything. The Netflix client for Android (my other STB) is shitty for use on a TV, which is sad. So I use the Wii. 480p is good enough for me. I only have 5Mbps anyway, so why bother fucking with HD? Can't do anything else on the connection at the same time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Exactly.
We have two kids & a big dog. Netflix is handy for kid-stuff, but I haven't made a dent in it. Take tonight. Bathed the kids, read stories, kissed 'em good night then walked the dog. Now it's 9:30. I'll watch a little news, then hit the hay for my 6 AM start.
Get back to me when I'm retired and the problem's been solved.
> we aren’t anywhere close to getting a service that allows customers to pay a single monthly fee for access to a wide range of top-notch movies and TV shows
Yes we are, it's called an ISP.
Especially when watching movies where plot isn't what you're interested in.
When I was a child I thought as a child. Now that I'm grown I've moved past childish ways.
Don't ascribe to others your behavior. Some of us take pride in being self-sufficient consumers.
I rarely watch movies these days, so Netflix and other subscription based services wouldn't work for me. I do like Amazon's Video on Demand and iTunes services, but not everything is rental (why buy if I am only watch it once?), available, and in true HD. Also, Amazon doesn't let me download HD videos to play in Amazon Unbox (Windows only and buggy) to play locally (frak streaming with unstable and slow Internet connections).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
or when I can turn on my Blu-Ray player and connect to a lot of other free streams?
Because your bluray player is (most likely) a big piece of shit with a tiny cpu, a small amount of ram (for buffering), with a shitty network stack, so it can't deliver a great streaming performance, no matter how good the internet connection you have is.
If you are going to stream from a CE device... a Roku, or a game console.
Because your time is worth something? If you have to update that security hole you built one time it will, if you are paid properly, cost you more than the apple TV .
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Why would I pay for an Apple TV device when I can load XBMC on an old computer and have the same kind of thing for free, or when I can turn on my Blu-Ray player and connect to a lot of other free streams?
Because you don't like fan noise in the living room?
Because you'd like to use a simple 5 button remote?
Because you don't want to pay for your "economy" in power bills?
Or, as the article was saying, because you want availability to just released content?
I'm not sure what your rationale is but I'm assuming it must be perverse
And the security holes in the Apple TV box that I can't fix...?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
LETMEWATCHTHIS !
And XBMC.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
All true. These aren't present. We end up watching Hulu/Comcast most of the time, and every week or so rent or use "noncommercial distribution" for a prime movie or show. (Often, you can't even rent/buy a particular movie online, thus the noncommercial options)
Today, we watched "The day the Earth stood still"... a wickedly good movie, even if in black & white. Yeah, 100% satisfying...
Truly, I don't understand them making episodes otherwise streamed not available for viewing historically. Don't more eyeballs translate into more revenue?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Go buy yourself a Raspbery Pi, download the boot-image for Rasbmc, boot it up, go have a coffee and a sandwich.
When you get back -- you'll have all the TV and movies you could want -- for the cost of your monthly internet connection.
If Netflix was available here, I'd pay for it -- but since it's not (legally) available to NZers, I figure that the movie/TV producers don't want my money and use XBMC instead. I'm not going to force them to take my cash if they don't want it -- but they better not complain about the fact that I'm watching their stuff for free in the meantime.
Interesting, because, to me, most movies that win lots of those awards [...]
Yeah. Whatever. The point stands. Make any list of 'good movies' you like using ANY criteria you want, and most of them won't be on netflix.
The only exception would be if your list was literally "good movies I found on netflix today"... and even that would fail after a few months due to netflix only having temporary rights to many of the movies in its library.
Hell, these people think 'gravity' is good science fiction, so their opinions count for exactly nothing to me.
Is 2001 on netflix? Is Bladerunner? Is "Solaris" (either of them)? Is "Alien"? "The 13th Floor"? "Inception"? "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"? I don't pretend to know what YOU think were good SF movies... but that's some highlights from my list and NONE of those are on netflix...
pornhub satisfies my needs.
You're assuming that I care about movies and TV shows when I do not.
What you really need is a US Proxying service that proxies specific URLs.
You can get Netflix with a DNS Proxy service; that uses DNS to selectively proxy certain URLs to defeat the Geoblocking, but NOT proxy the content connections for Netflix.
Yes that's what I mean, while you could do it through a proxy the actual content is too large and that would be too costly so using one of the DNS services like proxyDNS is the way to go.
I live in West Seattle and I stream both Netflix and HuluPlus simulataneously in two different rooms over the same (Comcast/Xfinity) wifi router (and I do NOT pay extra for that damned "boost" stupidity). Works just fine in HD on both screens (both supported by wifi-enabled blu-ray players - not even computers, although I'm pretty sure those will work just as well).
Why the hell is your internal HOME MEDIA SHARING network being attacked? If you're regularly sharing out your router to people who you don't trust, you're probably not being paid much and therefore cost you less than said appliance.
I mean, seriously? Your router should be protecting all external attacks unless you specifically port forward to your XMBC box...
Top Gear can be torrented or sometimes watched on Streetfire if they don't fuck it up.
If you want to watch the latest Top Gear (or Fifth Gear), go here - http://www.finalgear.com/
And nothing of value is missed. What's your point?
You see some movies you want to watch, a few weeks later when you have time they aren't available anymore. Other movies you want to watch are never available. You could go pull out the dvd but it's easier to just find something else. You could subscribe to 4 or 5 streaming services and not get 10% of the content of an average pirate site. Then more isp's are bringing in bandwidth limits, a normal family can burn though 200-300gb easily under a month with 2 or 3 netflixs running at the same time. Then there is the millions of people with no access to real broadband, satellite users who may get 175-300mb per day (enough for 20 minutes of streaming) and others using 3/4g service at home with tiny monthly data amounts starting at 2gb per month (64MB per day) for $50 going to 20GB for $120+. People try to do it legally, in the end it's still easier to just acquire them from other sources at no cost.
Netflix is normally fine, until your Internet connection goes down in the middle of the movie.
Same goes for most other online services.
I use them too, but when I want to watch a movie a little bit more seriously (if I'm having friends over for example) I still mostly download the movie beforehand.
Yes, I believe watching Helix is perfect to make the pain of your injury seem like nothing.
It doesn't matter to the original story whether someone uses Netflix or combination of streaming services, it's still streaming. Both of you are happy with your selection. I'm happy with mine, I use Netflix and Apple TV. So based on this empirical study of 3 people we can say that 3 out of 3 are happy with movie streaming. The author of the article has failed.
So? I see no ethical problem time shifting content that has already been paid for. If you use the internet for that, so what?
The ethical issue arises if the content had not been paid for at all.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
Nope. Looked into subscribing using VPNs etc. Catch point was the credit card needing a US address.
Besides which if I have to do something illegal (VPN and what amounts to identity fraud) I might as well just pirate since it is all the same.
My money is here if they want it...but they apparently don't. I am not playing a rigged and unfair game if there is an alternative.
So you can take your shill and shove it where the sun don't shine. Your straw man holds no water.
And not a fuck was given. There's more than enough to watch. If a movie maker doesn't want me to see their previous movie, that's their own business. I'm not going out of my way to help them distribute their product to me.
That is exactly the point.
With Napster we had a glimpse of a technology where everything was available. Literally. If someone in some place produced a thing, no matter when or where or who, it was available (to be honest, it was not *that* good, but the potential was there). I'm talking about 100% of the humanity's production. Nothing ever lost, no matter how obscure or remote or new or old. This sounds like utopia, but the technology is here and now.
The media conglomerates dislike that future. They prefer a future where the public is contempt with the content *they* choose, and other content (old, or just not made under their scrutiny) just disappears alongside any other forms of competition. The public is dangerous when they think about themselves as more than consumers. They know that, so they make immense efforts to educate the public this way, and you are already assimilated. "There's more than enough to watch" is exactly the sentiment they are looking for.
The article states: "we’ll have to settle for something less than ideal.". Who the hell cares? It's just movies and TV shows anyways. I watch them when I get very bored or don't have anything meaninfull to do. Netflix is good enough for me. For all I know the rest of those movie masterpieces could as well not exist. It's not my duty to watch every damn series ever made. I watch whatever I feel like. And I sure as hell don't feel like watching anything that takes extra time or money to find. Also, once adds arrive to Netflix I'm out. They are coming, trust me on this one.
There has been one service that has not been fragmented and has offered a myriad of rich, current media.
Imagine the movie studios, netflix, lovefilm, cinemas, HBO and cable companies in general, napster, hipster, shitster and all the rest rolled into one awesome FREE service.
Have they heard of www.thepiratebay.org ? -recommended for the latest releases.
Do they not realize that the best way to not only vastly reduce the amount of piracy going on but to increase their profits too is to make their content available for streaming either through pay-by-the-month or pay-per-show?
I for one have quite a few things I wish I could watch again (not necessarily own but watch once) but cant legally acquire (on DVD or via any internet service). Some of them are things I would probably be willing to pay for but the studios wont give me that option.
Its not just the big Hollywood studios either, I have things from History Channel, Discovery Channel, National Geographic and others on my wishlist.
...I will continue to obtain what I want though the underbelly because at the end of the day there are less hoops to jump through.
If only Big Media would realise that their method is basically madness.
And that's one of the biggest problems with netflix and other streaming services... Your limited by your bandwidth, which is also likely to go down during peak times (ie when you want to watch), and heavy use streaming means you can't do anything else on the connection either because its too slow or because your activity would cause the stream to stall.
I want a service where i can download and watch later, i have limited peak time bandwidth usage and unlimited late at night, at night the network is less congested therefore faster and i'm generally asleep so i don't care if it makes the connection laggy, and downloads are not hampered by fluctuations in performance.
With a downloaded file i can take it offline to watch somewhere i have no or poor connectivity, once the file is downloaded i can watch it knowing there wont be any dropouts, i can download overnight in whatever quality i want , even a 1080p movie will be finished by the morning on a 5mbps connection.
Streaming is often utterly impractical at the times you most want to watch something, eg:
on a train/bus/coach/car - the motion makes 3g slower, tunnels make it drop out entirely as does travelling in/out of service areas...
mobile data is often expensive...
abroad - roaming data is even more expensive
wifi is not always available, and even when it is sometimes its unusably slow and you trying to stream only compounds the problem...
On the other hand, a usb stick full of stuff you downloaded the previous night works very well in all of these situations. I travel a lot, and frequently find myself sitting around bored waiting for something, while having poor or no internet connection.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
So you're violating their terms of service and effectively pirating the content anyway...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Everything was available everywhere. Napster delivered MP3s, which worked on every device, including the dirt-cheap Chinese players. Netflix works on devices blessed by Netflix. I have a few friends who work there (in the OpenConnect group) and they say that there are about 80 types of devices (all with special streaming requirements) that they have to support. The Napster equivalent would just let me download H.264 video files with no DRM. I could play them on any device, including my old WebOS tablet (which is never going to be worth any company's time to support, but can happily play back H.264) or the FreeBSD box connected to my projector (similarly, far too small a nice to be worthwhile for Netflix to support). If a company wanted to create a Netflix-compatible appliance, they wouldn't have to talk to Netflix, they'd just use published APIs for getting the video files, and as long as the person using the device entered some valid login credentials it would work.
The arguments against this model?
The problem is that the studios are still seeing the world as a rent / buy dichotomy. For digital goods, the concept of renting doesn't make much sense. I don't want to pay to rent a movie, I want to pay to have on-demand access to an ever-growing catalogue of things that I might want to watch. Currently, the closest I get to that is with a DVD rental service, and that's a long way from ideal.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think the problem is that all of these services lack a true commitment of providing content. They try too hard to be unique. When you look at cable or satellite providers. They are simply the conduits for media content, and not trying to provide anymore then that. We don't need exclusive agreements and be forced to pay several providers for all of our streaming content. I myself got caught up in the mess of having to buy Hulu Plus, Netflix, and pay per episode or movie sites like Apple TV or Amazon or Google Play. But then I decided to really research which service overall provides the content I wanted. The other issue is that some content only has a limited contract and goes away after a period of time. This too me is another streaming problem as you never really own anything like you would with a physical media content. Streaming has a long way to go to satisfy large numbers of users and really compete against cable and satellite. Fee's will most likely go up and the value of streaming vs the others will be less apparent.
But beyond that, even if Netflix did offer true 1080p, they still fall way short of what pirates offer:
It took a long time, but legit music offerings are finally all around better than pirate offerings. And it's been a fantastic financial success. It's crystal clear what gets consumers to pay. Netflix is nowhere near satisfying for anyone who values the things I listed, which is a non-trivial percent of people. Everyone who comes over my house is absolutely astounded that I have 80+ full TV shows (nearly 1/3rd in HD, mostly because HD sources are not available) and 500+ HD movies all able to be played any time, on either my monitor or the tv, or copied to any device, going straight into the program, with a single click. They've never experienced anything like it. And there's no amount of money I could pay to have it legally. (although few consumers would even want a setup that requires 12TB of disk space and NAS, but they certainly would like the benefits on a smaller collection).
And right there is where they could rake in the cash from even a dedicated pirate like me: Offer me the dozens of shows in HD that aren't able to be pirated, and the other dozen that need remastering in hd... and I'd pay. I have paid. Unfortunately it was to a cyberlocker because no public torrent existed, no paid legit offer existed... but there it was, 5 seasons all in full HD, on uploaded.com.
There's this thing called Plex Media Server.
Plex accesses locally defined content libraries, scrapes them for metadata and makes them available both locally for clients smart enough to play back the raw data or transcodes them for access by dumb (DLNA, like Playstations or the like) or reduced-capability clients like iFruits. Furthermore, it negotiates authentication-based access and sharing with the Plex Web Service, meaning that you can expose your media collection over the internet, for access outside your home or use the service to share with others. Plex isn't supported by as large a collection of consumer electronics as Netflix, but it is on a lot of smart TV systems and runs on most mobile and desktop platforms.
If you already have a respectable collection of local media and a half-decent computer you're willing to leave on, you more or less have a streaming media service that is entirely under your control. If you're enough of a nerd to be reading this deep in a Slashdot comment thread, you're also enough of a nerd to figure out how to leverage Plex or something like it to make a content service that is satisfactory for your needs.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Who owns the hbo and showtime cash cows? Movie companies! Why would they want to destroy these channels to gives cash to the streaming companies?
Unless you're from a country that only gets "we don't want your money because you're not from USA, UK nor Germany, go fuck yourself" message.
Mandatory licensing. Problem solved. We would prefer the market take care of such things, but it should be obvious after more than a decade that it isn't going to.
All we really need from Congress is to make copyright owners license their works for the same price to all who are willing to pay in return for copyright protections. No licensing, no copyright protections. Problem solved.
FTFA: we aren’t anywhere close to getting a service that allows customers to pay a single monthly fee for access to a wide range of top-notch movies and TV shows.Instead of a single comprehensive service, the future of digital TV and movies is destined to be fragmented...
Thankfully, there's still bittorrent...your one-stop shop for pretty much anything you want to watch.
I guess we should be thankful that the media companies are at least beginning to realize what their customers want, even if they are still declining to provide it.
Local DVD rental store: 10,000 titles in the back catalog. $7 for three rentals, one week. $10 for five rentals, one week.
Netflix can blow themselves blue.
True, I have to wait two years for hit titles to slide off the best renter shelf. This sometimes diverts me to the Criterion shelf. Actually, it's more of an entire wall display than a mere shelf, with as many titles as my local Blockbuster used to have in their entire single-copy foreign movie Independence Day refusnik kiosk (hidden behind the Snack and Grab), the top shelf of which barely came up to my belly button. When I wanted Gong Li, I had to show some butt crack.
I was always determined to stoop.
Netflix is 100% satisfying.
Sure, if you are satisfied by most of the top 200 movies on IMDB not being available there...
Most academy award winners? Not present. Most Oscar winners? Not present. Most Sundance Film Festival Winners? Not present. ...
I don't believe you're being fair. This year's winners might not be there, but previous years' are. Unless you need to watch the latest movies, there is plenty on Netflix. We sometimes have three different Netflix feeds going at once in our house (Verizon FIOS) and it is extremely rare to see any stalling. YMMV.
Maybe because he gives network access to friends. Maybe his friends are not tech savvy. _They_ could be threats. Are you implying that an edge firewall is the be-all and end-all?
Netflix is 100% satisfying. WTF back country bullshit throttled cable internet service are you using?
I don't know why this /. user got modded as a Troll for having his own opinion of a service? Clearly some mods in here are controlled by their personal opinions instead of being objective. Sure...the user may not sound politically correct, but since when did we become so politically correct in here that we can't express ourselves?
Personally I love Netflix, can't beat the price for what I get, here we pay around 9USD for it, and I've used it for a year now. I'd pay 9 bucks for 50-60 episodes of Breaking bad any day, not to mention House of Cards. And it's a great way to discover all those movies that DIDN'T make it as the official Hollywood box-office hits of our times. For example, I've had the great pleasure of discovering cool 80's movies that never really made it because they where overshadowed by other famous movies, but they are actually quite pleasing to watch, and the fact that I can relive my 80's with FRESH new material, is just priceless IMHO.
Sure, I wish there was more content on Netflix, some days feels dry - but then again...nine bucks to avoid the mind numbingly stupid broadcast or cable TV with its endless onslaught advertisement of the worlds worst repetitive TV-ads for a few minutes of entertainment? I'd take Netflix any day.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I say fuck 'em. Until they get their act together and provide what is needed instead of supporting a business mdoel better suited for the 50s, I'll stick with USENET, torrents, and file sharing services to watch the broadcast shows I like.
When they decide they need the business, they'll come up with reasonable plans and I'll come back. Until then, I'll be happy with my own servers providing the content I want, from any source I want, when I want it.
The never-attainable struggle for perfection and certainty is the source of much of human suffering.
People try to attain enlightenment, in the hope of finding ultimate peace, but the struggle to attain perfect peace, itself reinforces the feeling that life as it is has to be rejected and avoided. But the way you put it is simpler and better.
Netflix disk delivery + handbrake and a seedbox.
Movies I rip myself with a nice automated system, Tv shows from the seedbox. works fantastic and better than any service. Maybe someday when we are not dealing with 3rd world country quality of internet in the USA, we might be able to stream decently.
But unfortunately bottom of the Darell quality ISP's like Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, etc will limit any technology adoption. Some day the USA will catch up with the rest of the world.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Actually, I only use streamed Netflix for TV shows. For movies, I get the discs in the mail, and the selection is better there for movies.
Unfortunately, I've been getting a lot of scratched discs lately.
You have netflix, hulu+ and Apple media on an XBMC? you need to share this with the XBMC guys because nobody else is getting this to work.
I run XBMC, been using it for 10+ years. It is awesome for local media, but aggressively protected streaming media it sucks donkey balls.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The other issue with netflix is they refuse to give you any controls. I want to set it to only ever stream in Standard Def. Stop trying to stream in highest HD when "network has changed"
Most TV shows I could care less about seeing in HD and would rather it play from begin to end without problems.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yes. The one-stop model is cable TV, where we pay for tons of crap we don't want. A la carte is what we have been screaming for.
This is where UltraViolet's CFF downloads are supposed to be useful. Finally they're reaching their sunrise date, but it remains to be seen how easy it will be to get the content etc.
Why was that modded down? Those are valid points...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
There are more than one options with reasons to subscribe to all of them (no matter how bad, hulu plus cough ads cough).
I think we should see an emerging market with competition as a good, healthy thing, yeah? It means they're more willing to offer more for less to get your money. If there was just one stop that had everything you wanted, it'd be pretty expensive, I'd wager...
Other people have responded reasonably, thus I am free to say, for instance, "GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU CONDESCENDING TWAT"!
I feel better.
I'm going to watch whatever movie I want at home. When they movie studios get their shit together and give me a way to pay them to do the same thing, I will. I really don't give a shit either way.
Netflix is 100% satisfying.
The Moves Unlimited catalog is 800 pages, listing tens of thousands of videos in print.
There are specialist catalogs out there which probe much deeper into certain genres. Some, like The Serial Squadron and International Historic Films are passionate about film and video restoration.
Now and again, I'll discover a website which has offers a handful of "sponsored films" on DVD --- industrial, educational and religious films ---- sourced from small private collections which I'd known only through chance encounters with surviving 16mm prints.
I've said nothing here as yet about high definition playback, 3D, sound quality, translation or captioning. But there is a reason why Walmart's Blu Ray selection has been growing rapidly along with the screen size and technical sophistication of its HD sets and sound bars.
Disney's "Frozen" has been famously translated into over forty languages, a sampling of which can be found here: Disney's Frozen - "Let It Go" Multi-Language Full Sequence
The North American based streaming service may not need so broad a reach, but the days when it could be English only are fading fast.
The neighborhood video store can offer a better selection than the Red Box --- but still only a tiny sampling of what is out there. Netflix may have what you want, assuming you are willing to wrestle long enough with what it laughingly calls a search engine to find it.
But it won't have everything you want --- with the features you want, or in the quality you want,
Those who make legal downloading impossible will make illegal downloading inevitable...
Cyber-Kennedy...
surprisingly, my 4-year-old blu-ray player's netflix app is much better than roku's, at least when it comes to browsing.
...
So buy your own dvd's, convert them to whatever format, and then stream the movies and tv shows yourself at home. Netflix has been showing the same old shit(just movies) over and over again. Anyway, today's tv programming sucks shit, nothing but those reality tv crap.
So why aren't you doing all those things right now? You're posting on Slashdot, what a monumental waste of time, you could be using that to bring peace to the Middle East! You bastard.
The fact that larger problems exist does not mean that smaller problems are not, in fact, problems.
ok so just delete it after watching.
The movie studio is willing to license movies to the streaming provider at a far smaller royalty if the streaming provider can prove to the studio that every user will "delete it after watching." This is the difference between the "rent" button and the "buy" button. Streaming keeps the studio satisfied because no more than a few seconds of the movie are on the end user's storage at once.
also, rewind and forward sucks hard on streaming.
This is a problem specifically with Netflix, not with streaming in general. I can think of efficient ways around this, such as changing the decryption key before each keyframe. This would allow the application to cache much larger portions of the movie without making it accessible long term, because the only part that would then be "streamed" is the decryption key for each group of pictures.
a wickedly good movie, even if in black & white.
There are tons of great movies from before the advent/mass use of color film. Hell, there are black and white films made in recent decades that are good. Kids these days...
I agree. I'd even make it (or some other way of "must be made available" language) a provision of copyright. No more vault-hoarding. Out of print should mean out of copyright.
...
Use one, you'll understand.
If you think XBMC is often, you've never used a real media center package. XBMC is shit. Its only redeeming quality is that its free, beyond that its not impressive.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Are not going to get exploited on your private network unless your hacking it yourself.
If someone can get to your Apple TV to hack it, you've already fucked up to the point hat you're probably fully infected with viruses in the first place across your entire network.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"We’ll all face a complex decision tree when choosing what to watch, and we’ll have to settle for something less than ideal."
Wrong.
That's what the television/movie industry wants everyone to think. In reality, if (consumer) can't quickly and easily find a paid/legal service to watch what they want when they want how they want, a free/pirated version of the content in question is often literally a click away.
If legal services refuse to compete, then illegal services fill that void.
Regardless of your stance on the "morality" of piracy, this is the way things are and it is the way things will continue to be until legal services become competitive by providing what people want, how they want it, where they want it, and when they want it. End of story.
While I admit that Netflix and the like aren't perfect, I can easily justify three or four of them at $8-$10 per month instead of the $150 I current pay for my satellite service. My current service has 300 channels of shit and the movie channels run the same movies over and over. At my house we constantly joke about Dantes Peak being on at least 5 times per month. So yeah, there is much to be desired and when the studios get beyond their greed and figure it out, we will have a better system.
"I want a service where i can download and watch later,"
I do this with Google Play movies/tv on my Android tablet.
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
I might have a somewhat luddite view on this subject, but for me the whole concept of canned visual entertainment has failed. Since it has failed, I have given up on it. I can't remember the last movie I saw, I only know it was a long... time ago - many years. I do remember some movies from before that time which somehow managed to get stuck so I can not state unequivocally that movies are not worth the celluloid they used to be printed on but the industry has made the whole experience around it so distasteful that I feel better iff without. On the risk of sounding like a Luddite I can honestly say that I'd rather read the book. Which I do, a lot. Time and time again my own imagination produces better special effects than the UK, Canada and New Zealand manage.
--frank[at]unternet.org
No. Music industry has shown this to be false. Now that I can get good music for a reasonable price without DRM, it's much less hassle to go buy it then pirate it. More than anything, I am lazy and want simple. If you provide that to me at a reasonable cost, I'll happily pay it.
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Um. No. Wrong. I don't want a subscription. I want to watch a movie/episode/game/whatever when it suits me. Of course it should be cheaper if one subscribes (fidelity reward) but I don't want to subscribe to a bunch of stuff I don't use.
Yeah I like my PS3 as well....
That comment is BS. Steam has proven that when offered a good service people will use it. I haven't pirated a game in ages because Steam just works. I still pirate TV shows and movies daily because Piratebay simply offer the best service.
I am not interested in streaming service or sites with too much exclusivity or DRM. I want a place where I can download ALL the shows in standard format that I can store locally.
I used to have Direct TV. For years... It was great.
But the monthly bills were too high, and I also had NF. I wondered why I had both and did some hard thinking about it.
I got rid of the satellite and kept NF.
I was totally satisfied with the DVD only plan for a while.
Then streaming came out and I tried that...
It worked great for about the first two years.
Now it is spotty and annoying.
Both NF and my ISP point the finger at the other one.
Right now I'm probably ok with NF not having the latest CRAP you can get from RedBox...
I always have to laugh at people who complain about what NF doesn't have...
I ask what films they want to watch and have to hide my derision.
NF actually has a large amount of incredible foreign and indie films, docs, all kinds of cool shit.
I never have a problem finding something to watch.
The problem is with the streaming itself.
What it doesn't have is the latest garbage peddled by the big studios, that for some reason most people want to watch.
The Hobbit?
Give me a break.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
If it's not a live show then streaming it is ultery stupid. We need a service other than Piratebay that allows people to download and save their movies.
Posting anon because I already modded - privateinternetaccess.com accepts BTC as currency, so buy the coin in euro/whatever then buy the service. It's $33USD/yr IIRC & great service (disclaimer: I have no connection to them other than using them 2 years).
I realize you're on a tech forum, but given your last comment I feel compelled to ask if you realize the difference between "streaming" off a local harddrive and streaming over the internet. Of course one is going to seek quicker than the other!
I only pirate movies and TV shows that aren't available in the Netflix.
This year's winners might not be there, but previous years' are.
No. They aren't. Lets pick a year at random .. 2004
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7...
Ok Netflix:
Million Dollar Baby - No
Ray - No
The Aviator - No
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - No
Sideways - No
The Incredibles - No
The Sea Inside (foreign language) - Yes
Wasp (live action short) - No
Ryan (animated short) - No
Born into Brothels (documentary) - No
Mighty Times: The Children's March (documentary short) - No
Finding Neverland - No
The Motorcycle Diaries - No
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events - No
So... 1 out of all of them.
don't believe you're being fair.
I think I'm being VERY fair. 2004 is 10 years ago.
The black box downloads movies/shows onto the hard drive during off-peak hours. They (Netflix, Amazon, whoever) can encrypt the hell out of it...I don't care. I sit down with my popcorn and get to pick from my list. For ~$10/month I have access to the ENTIRE collection of titles and NOT just those licensed for streaming. I think an argument could be made that delivering an encrypted (just for my personal key) copy of the movie is no different then mailing me a blue ray.
No stuttering. No ISP problems. No extortion $$$ to Comcast.
I have a dream...:)
Try unblock-us.com for all your US TV website viewing.
-Xoltri
Meh, once upon a time I was a downloading fiend. In recent years though as I have become more financially stable and distribution of media has improved I find that I download almost nothing. I still keep a VPN account around just in case but rarely ever use it. The only things I download now seem to be TV show episodes that I got too far behind on to catch up on through the shows website. I don't mind muting my way through commercial breaks on the official steams so as long as they I can get it through the official sites I typically do.
I started watching Breaking Bad earlier this year on Netflix. I got to the end of the available episodes and was very much looking forward to seeing the last half of the final season but it wasn't available yet. The thought occured to me that I could just go download it but the trouble of setting up the VPN and everything was just too much of a hassle when I figured the episodes would show up on Netflix sooner or later, and they did.
Fine, Netflix doesn't work for YOU. It does work for ME.
The American "movie" industry is awful. Producing nothing but formulaic crap. Quite why anyone bothers with it is beyond me.
I stopped watching TV, "movies" etc. about a decade ago and have never looked back. Instead I spent my time learning a couple of languages, a couple of instruments and going out and about talking to people.
I don't care if I never see a "movie" ever again :)
I don't think Netflix is anywhere near 100% satisfying but it comes pretty close. It's basically a replacement for 30 or so channels on cable that are dominated by re-runs.
In other words it replaces a source for a small percentage of stuff we've already seen. Swell. Don't know about you but I don't really care to watch the same movies over and over again. I've tried Netflix several times and I can never find enough to watch to make it worth the cost.
However, I think the idea that this has to be some sort of one stop option is bogus and stupid. There's no good reason that multiple services can't do the job
There also is no reason one service can't do the job. Why would I want to deal with multiple services when it is not technologically necessary? What I want is multiple one stop shopping services competing for my business. I want ala-carte programming for movies, tv and internet video for a single source and preferably for a reasonable flat fee. Just because it isn't done that way today doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.
We already have multiple channels in the old model.
Which is relevant how?
Netflix + Amazon(PPV) together is a pretty complete solution.
Really? How about live sporting events? Reruns of sports? Every movie currently available on DVD or in theaters? Ala-carte TV stations? "Complete solution"? Maybe for you but not for most of us.
To be fair, that would have described any Blockbuster store in the last 20 years. I worked at one in high school. The godfather? We had two of the trillogy. Brittney Spears' movie? Literally 40 copies.
No, no it isn't
Last night I was surfing netflix and noticed the old Twilight Zone, so I went to watch "Time Enough at Last" (Episode 1 from Season 8 which aired in January of 1953) - but noooooo, netflix only has S1-3 and 5.
The *only* reason I couldn't watch the episode I wanted is because someone, somewhere, is a fsking arsehole.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. I'd HAPPILY pay for a service that lets me stream any TV show or movie I want without commercials whenever I want. If that service existed, I believe piracy would cut in half in a month. Not that I'm admitting anything, but it's so stupid that there's clearly a market, they technical means to satisfy that market quite easily, providers already in place to serve that market, and shady sources to fill that market, but Noooooo... If you want to watch movies or TV without commercials when you want, you're a criminal.
Because I'm ENTITLED to movies and TV at a price I like!
The problem isn't that people don't know the difference between streaming and local playback! The problem is that streaming simply is inferior tech compared to local playback. Of course, people who are accustomed to year 2000 tech are, yes, going to find it "unsatisfying." You would expect a tech downgrade to come with that kind of baggage.
Next on Slashdot: Car Owners wonder why Ox Carts are unsatisfying to drive.
This one little playback issue (though it's not Netflix's only problem) is one of the many illustrations why, when people bring up Netflix as some kind of acceptable modern thing, I'm just totally baffled. In 2000 you wouldn't have praised Netflix (because you were already using something better than Netflix back then), so why praise it now, when you ought to expect things to work at least as well? (And really, I think most of us expect our 2014 computers to be better than our 2000 computers.)
IMHO Sickbeard and Couchpotato (and their like) are the benchmark techs, now. I don't mind paying, but stuff has to be that good, and I'm not going to settle for less. Nobody offers products anywhere in that league of quality yet, so nobody is getting my money right now. I await their opening for business.
Strangely, (and I say this as a non-Apple guy who doesn't have any Apple stuff) I think iTunes is closest to doing it. All they have to do is open up the API so people don't have to use the shitty iTunes application to buy the files -- let us write sickbeard or nzbdrone plugins. And lose the DRM so the video files can be played on anything (if you try to lock me into Apple players, that's a dealbreaker ; OTOH if the files play on everything, then Apple's hardware can possibly be a contender). Those two things (open API and DRM-free files), and they'll have a winner, and start displacing piracy.
Yay, another article written by someone who has no idea what they're talking about. Hurray! Let's take an average movie. It's released in theaters for $x per ticket and the movie makers make the majority of their money. Then after a certain time period, it hits DVD and physical DVD rental services like redbox. They make a bit on that. Then it hits paid streaming/rental services like Apple and Amazon, sometimes at the same time as the DVD release. Then after a certain time period, it hits netflix if they have the money to license it and is also available to premium cable channels like HBO or Showtime. Then, after a long period, it goes into cheaper pricing for streaming and broadcast channel licensing availability.
So to the author: there is no streaming service that will give you Ender's Game at the same time as Weekend At Bernie's 2 because it's in a different tier, you idiot! That's how movied have worked for decades! You want to see it sooner, you pay more. That's how it is and it works.
It's good enough for me at $7.99 USD / month. I can stream LOTS of different TV shows that I grew up watching and probably wouldn't have had the chance to watch otherwise (unless I wanted to go buy every season on DVD for $30.00 per season at best). I'm perfectly satisfied with what Netflix offers as far as streaming goes. Let's keep one thing in mind here. It's a business and they're in it to make money. I think $7.99 a month is perfectly fair for what they offer and I see new titles show up all the time.
Am I going to be able to search for any movie I want and stream it to my TV? No, and I shouldn't be able to for that price.
Not sure what this guy means by "not good enough" and I did RTFA.
It's dependable as well. I watch shows just about EVERY night and never have any problems with the streams not keeping up.
I'm well satisfied with the service personally. If you don't like it, don't pay for it. Simple.
Enternal Sunshine... is available on streaming.
What? So you have to take 3 seconds out of your life to hit two buttons, instead of just one?
Hang on, let me call a WAAAAAAAHmbulace for you.
Dammit, I knew I'd been doing it wrong! Here I'd been climbing the hungry and feeding the mountains. That explains the restraining order.
How does a mountain get a restraining order?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The price is right for the service level we've come to expect from the entertainment business...
What you save on 'blockbusters', you can spend on owning the eclectic via Amazon.
Cost of production and distribution keep dropping.
The incumbents are being challenged by HBO, etc.
A shake out looks eminent.
I can't wait to view the carnage.
None of the studio's end customers are asking for it to be inaccessible long term. They can remove that from the problem without harming the experience (i.e. the usefulness, i.e. the degree by which it fits market demand, i.e. their gross revenue, i.e. their gross profit) in any way, and if that makes their middleman's (Netflix's) caching work better, they might even make more money.
Oh right, I keep forgetting: it's not about making money. Every time people talk about this stuff, I keep mistakenly thinking of it terms of a business and make ridiculous suggestions based on the incorrect premise. Sometimes I think the entertainment "industry" simply shouldn't be discussed on Slashdot at all. Like creationism. It's all founded on ideas that most people (especially techies) will never be able to understand.
Never have to worry about streaming, piracy charges, DRM etc. etc.
Over time I'm sure it's been cheaper that what I pay for bandwidth too.
None of the studio's end customers are asking for it to be inaccessible long term.
Of course they are, by paying for a rental rather than a purchase. If customers didn't want "it to be inaccessible long term", they'd buy it on DVD, BD, or iTunes instead of streaming it on Netflix.
this is the United States, you'd think we'd have great broadband like they have in places like Bulgaria. Maybe I'm getting factious/bitchy but Cringely wrote an article on how Silicon Valley went from the fastest to the slowest in high-speed internet (cannot find link to article right now).
mfwright@batnet.com
Well, there is this thing called buffering where you store data for a while so that if you need again it's still available locally. Storing 30 seconds of video on either side of the current position and making it randomly addressible isn't too much to ask. In fact Netflix does do some buffering, but the interface to it is so bad that it hardly matters. A simple seek backward still takes too long.
>Most Oscar winners? Not present.
And not a fuck was given. There's more than enough to watch
If you just want to "watch something" and are fine cruising through a limited catalog hoping something will spark your interest, then Netflix's streaming is probably sufficient (I am pretty much never in this sort of mood).
If you have a list of specific titles you'd like to get to, then Netflix/Amazon/etc Streaming's piss-poor selection will be a source of endless frustration, and you'll think the service is nowhere near ready to replace the DVD-by-mail system.
I am a netflix subscriber and I think it represents tremendous value. House of Cards is excellent (and that's actually representative of the fragmentation problem since its a netflix program not available legitimately elsewhere.)
However, I often decide what I want to watch, and then look to watch it. The odds that anything I might wish to watch being on netflix chosen outside of "browsing netflix" is pretty small.
I've even often had things on my "list of things to watch" disappear from netflix before I've watched them, or worse, in the case of series, before I've finished watching them.
Anyone who claims "netflix is 100% satisfying" must be the sort of person who logs in, browses until they find something, and then watches that. That's actually a pretty sad model of consumerism -- as you are basically content to have netflix dictate what tiny subset of what is available you watch; and for the most part you miss out on most of the stuff that's actually good. (regardless of whether you put any stock in various film awards ceremonies, even a list of YOUR top 20 movies is likely to be unfulfilled by netflix.
what would you consider a real media center package? I'm looking for good options to build my system with :)
even some stuff that used to be english-only (Soul Eater comes to mind) now has subtitles available. (I asked the Funimation rep at a convention about language options on netflix at one time, and he said "we really are working on it"; looks like they got it together.)
> Because your bluray player is (most likely) a big piece of shit with a tiny cpu, a small amount of ram (for buffering), with a shitty network stack, so it can't deliver a great streaming performance, no matter how good the internet connection you have is.
A Roku isn't going to be any different in this regard. They are ALL puny underpowered ARM devices that can't handle any deviation from plan.
That's probably why the OP likes the idea of running a copy of XBMC on an old PC. An obsolete PC will still run circles around any ARM appliance once you decide to stray from the reservation.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Netflix is also not exceptionally good at keeping their anime disc collections complete. I added Kiddy Grade to my queue and about half the discs went into "save for later" land. *sigh*
The problem with Movie streaming is that there's nothing good to watch.
My memory isn't so bad that I need to re-experience my favorite works more than once in a five year period. Even when money and availability is no obstacle it's not worth my the investment of my valuable entertainment time to waste on some non-interactive butchering and re-butchering of books, comic books, and even movies that I've already experienced. The new crap is all re-hashes of the old, and even the "original" stories have tired old plot-lines taken damn near directly form the books I read a decade or more ago. I can't invest 2 hours of my evening and take the high risk being bored out of my gourd when I have damn near guaranteed entertainment options elsewhere.
Sorry, I used to watch more but TV and movies are essentially dead to me now. I've got Games, a few web-series, podcasts, books, and esp. the new audio book explosion vying for my time with better, more immersive, potentially interactive, and more entertaining content. I especially enjoy audio books as I can consume even fairly recent sci-fi releases while I do other things (like exercise outdoors).
It's fucking ridiculous when I think about it: Even old radio programs have adapted to the digital age as podcasts and dramatized audio books, and yet the multi-billion dollar industry of video is stuck in the 50's in terms of distribution (broadcast/streaming) and monetization models. Die a sad stale death already. The sooner the better, let the new web media take their place.
The only things I've pirated in the last two years:
1) Accidentally missed an episode of one of my favorite TV series, which naturally wasn't available online (except from pirate sites).
2) Game of Thrones, because HBO delays the DVD version by a full year after the original air date. And I still bought the box set after it came out.
If it's available from Netflix, I get it from Netflix.
> Why was that modded down? Those are valid points...
No they aren't. They're the usual Apple fanboy nonsense and cluelessness. As usual, the proudly ignorant are basing their FUD on gravely outdated information.
That's bound to happen when you frame your choices in terms of helplessness and extreme laziness.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I forget which series I was looking at, but I remember it started with season 2. WTF?
Because I'm ENTITLED to movies and TV at a price I like!
This whole thread is occurring because many, maybe even most on the Internet don't feel like the content companies are entitled to their region restrictions any longer. It's long past time that they lose their legal protections for outdated region controls just "because they can."
> Because I'm ENTITLED to movies and TV at a price I like!
Yes you are. It's called the free market.
As a matter of basic economic principles, the price of a product with highly elastic demand should be minimized. If this is not happening then something is probably broken somewhere.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I realize you're on a tech forum, but given your last comment I feel compelled to ask if you realize the difference between "streaming" off a local harddrive and streaming over the internet. Of course one is going to seek quicker than the other!
It's also yet another reason why those of us who don't like online streaming.. don't like online streaming. And there are so many reasons why online streaming is a step in the wrong direction.
Technology has advanced far enough that these days caches should be massive and seeking should be instant. That the player even needs to talk to the server and rebuffer content when rewinding is a failure of the interface.
Are not going to get exploited on your private network unless your hacking it yourself.
If someone can get to your Apple TV to hack it, you've already fucked up to the point hat you're probably fully infected with viruses in the first place across your entire network.
Surely the same logic applies to the XMBC home theatre controller built on that old PC that was gathering dust in the closet. The advantage to rolling your own is that you *can* actually fix things yourself as opposed to waiting for updates from Apple.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I agree with you on the 100%. That comment wasn't mine. I have only had Netflix for about 5 months and so far it has generally kept me happy. Yes, they don't have everything, but they do have a lot. And I have watched a lot of series on it (Breaking Bad, House of Cards). I suspect that if you've had it a long time, the value goes down unless they have a pretty serious supply of new stuff on a regular basis.
There are quite a few worthwhile movies on Netflix. Not looking terribly hard: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Ghostbusters, Dr. Strangelove, Fargo, Big Trouble in Little China, Silence of the Lambs, Airplane, Taxi Driver, The Usual Suspects, Donnie Brasco, The Hunt For Red October, Clue, American Psycho, Pulp Fiction, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, The Truman Show, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Terminator 2, Nightmare Before Christmas...
If you're a child of the 80s or early 90s, there is a pretty good collection of nostalgia fare there, too: Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Cry-Baby, Clueless, Footloose, Heathers, Say Anything, Ghost, License to Drive, Planes Trains and Automobile, Airheads, Beavis and Butthead do America, Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, The Adams Family, Adams Family Values, Scrooged, The Naked Gun, Explorers, Dreamscape, The Golden Child, Coming to America...
And of course if you have kids, the deals with Disney and Dreamscape have broadened the selection pretty drastically: The Croods, Mulan, Hercules, Pocahontas, Lilo and Stitch, The Emperor's New Groove, The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Prince of Egypt, Paranorman, Joseph: King of Dreams, Antz, James and the Giant Peach, The Fox and the Hound, Turbo, and all the Dreamworks [Shrek, Madagascar, How to Train Your Dragon, Monsters v Aliens, Kung Fu Panda] holiday specials.
There are definitely relatively few newer releases, but the catalog is significantly improved from when I first signed up.
Netflix is fun for the first month but then you've watched everything good and then it's just not worth it. I'll be cancelling my subscription because I think I only used once this month and that was out of utter boredom.
House of Cards: Present.
Netflix provides more quality entertainment for your money than any other service. If it weren't for sports I wouldn't even have regular TV.
Also, you won't find any of the top 200 movies on IMDB on regular TV, either, nor would you care to. When's the last time you watched Citizen Kane? Wizard of Oz? Also, being the huge movie buff that you apparently are, you should know that the Academy Awards and the Oscars are the same thing.
Btw, #5 and #6, on the IMDB top 200 are on Netflix: Pulp Fiction and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. That's just from taking a quick look at the list. In fact, I see several others on that list that I recall seeing on Netflix.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Netflix does not accept bitcoins which was the problem...
And they review accounts to make sure they are US citizens apparently because someone I know fell foul of that.
Also: I use steam and don't pirate games.
The shill above is just being an arsehole for the sake of it. Also to satisfy his small minded world view.
He can suck a dick along with the movie industry.
I like to think I am entitled to a fair deal free of predatory companies and their machination. Call me naive but that is what I believe.
Typically I can avoid this by altering my purchasing decisions but in this case due to a distribution monopoly I cannot.
I am willing to break the law to get one. If torrents did not exist I would not buy them at all such is my conviction. But with them why on earth would I put myself out just because some greedy billionaires make terrible, short sighted business decisions?!
Hence: They can go suck a dick along with anyone else who doesn't like it.
Also: I don't give a rat's arse what you think about it!
Several of those may not currently be on Netflix, but they have been in the past and may be in the future. The selection rotates. I watched Sideways on Netflix, I'm pretty sure I've seen several of those titles on there before. If you want to have Hollywood's entire back catalog available to you then there is simply no service that offers it -- not your local rental store (if you even still have one), not any streaming service, and not traditional cable/satellite TV.
As the guy who doesn't know that the Academy Award is an Oscar, I think you're being disingenuous when you pretend to care about it. So what, Netflix isn't for you, but to argue that it's a substandard service is just asinine. If you go to a video rental store, for the cost of a couple movies you could cover a whole month of Netflix. Furthermore, for me, if I go to the local rental store, I've already seen almost everything they have that's not a new release (which cost more). Netflix has tons of foreign and indie films that interest me. They're producing original content and some of it is superb (House of Cards).
I don't like to buy movies because I don't usually watch a movie more than once. That's why Netflix is a great deal for me. It's not the greatest service if you're looking for something specific -- but all those things I've seen in theaters or in the past. Sometimes I cancel the service for a while (usually football season) but I've always started it back up again.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Motorcycle Diaries are available on Netflix streaming.
My ePenis is huge. I have a trillion billion bits per second. My connection has never gone down. My ISP pays me to be a customer. Women approach me cold because my Internet connection is so fast.
But seriously, go fuck yourself if you're going to make-up such an obvious exaggeration. For those of us that live in Seattle we know this is a third-world shithole when it comes to Internet access no matter how many lies you Comcast-shills spout. We know better.
Downloading instead of streaming [...] allows you to stop the playback on one device and start it again in another.
So long as both devices support the same flavor of digital restrictions management that the studio insisted be applied to the lawful download.
It allows you to use OSS players and not some propritary embeded crapware.
Free software cannot meet the robustness requirements of the digital restrictions management that the studio insisted be applied to the lawful download.
Then perhaps "valid consumer[s]" should band together and form micro-studios to complement the major ones. This way, each micro-studio can set its own distribution terms for films that it makes.
Not looking terribly hard:
Did you generate that list by browsing netflix? Or by independently thinking of a bunch of good movies you want to see? I don't disagree that there is lots of good stuff on netflix, because there is. However, its just as notable for how much stuff is missing.
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"
I -just- looked that up, and it says:
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is unavailable to stream
I checked both the US and Canadian netflix sites... maybe its available where you are but its not here.
Dr. Strangelove
Excellent choice, I'm a big fan of Kubrick; one of the greatest directors of all time...
Dr. Strangelove - present!
2001: A Space Odyssey - unavailable to stream ...
The Shining - unavailable to stream
Full Metal Jacket - unavailable to stream
A Clockwork Orange - unavailable to stream
Barry Lyndon - unavailable to stream
Lolita - unavailable to stream
Spartacus - unavailable to stream
Eyes Wide Shut - unavailable to stream
So much much for Kubrick.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink [...]
Did you go to netflix, search for those and then get the rest of the list by see what it suggested? Because how else do you get that particular list of 80s flicks and not have 16 Candles or Real Genius or Fast Times at Ridgemont High?!
Let me guess, netflix didn't suggest them. Because they are unavailable to stream.
And of course if you have kids
The Croods, Mulan, Hercules,...
I do have kids, and I quite liked Mulan, and Warburton stole the show in Emperor's New Groove... but Netflix defintely is running the "B" list for kids movies...
A Bugs Life, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Bambi, Aladdin, Little Mermaid, Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Toy Story, Cinderella... all... you guessed it... unavailable to stream
As for your mention of Dreamworks [How to Train Your Dragon
Kung Fu Panda, Shrek, Madagascar...]
Again, I -just- checked, there some miscellaneous holiday shorts, and what appear to be the bonus shorts that are in the DVD extras are available. The actual movies though, each one is of those is "unavailable to stream".
Netflix provides more quality entertainment for your money than any other service.
I agree.
I'm simply pointing out that DESPITE that being the case, netflix has HUGE gaps in its library that mandate one go outside of it to fill.
Also, you won't find any of the top 200 movies on IMDB on regular TV, either, nor would you care to.
'regular TV' isn't an on-demand movie provider. There is a reason I've bought VCRs, then DVD players, and spent countless thousands on movie purchases and rentals. :)
In the meantime, I do want to see all the 'best movies'; so netflix not having scads of what most people think are the 'best movies' is a pretty big deal. Its not some internet wierdo saying Blood Sucking Nazi Zombies is the best movie ever made, and then getting bent out of shape its not on netflix... we're talking about the most influential, and highly rated movies and netflix having a smattering of them, missing more than its got.
iTunes at launch had some glaring gaps in the catalog - the Beatles, for example; but over 90% of what everyone was looking for was there.
The same isn't true of netflix. And its not just "new" stuff that's missing, which would be understandable. The big blockbusters, even the old ones, are largely missing.
Don't get me wrong, netflix is great, and a fantastic value. But I'd be extremely unhappy with it if it was the only place I watched movies from.
When's the last time you watched Citizen Kane?
Last year in fact, but that was also the first, and so far only time I've watched it; which is true, in my case, at least, for most movies -- which makes the breadth of the available library all that much more important.
Wizard of Oz
Bad choice. That's probably my wife's favorite so that one happens at least once a year. We watched it most recently a few days prior to watching Oz the Great and Powerful (also unavailable on netflix)
Also, being the huge movie buff that you apparently are, you should know that the Academy Awards and the Oscars are the same thing.
Thanks for that. It truly demonstrates how little I pay to that particular set of awards. :) My point was to create criteria to generate a list a list of arguably 'good movies' and then compare that to what you can get on netflix. I selected 'awarded' movies to try and emphasize that the movies netflix is missing aren't merely my 'slashdot nerd eclectic tastes', but movies that would rank as 'must see' on a LOT of peoples lists... whether its the Oscars or Sundance or top ranked movies on sites like IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes by critics or consumers.
Hear hear!
When I search for them:
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is unavailable to stream "
"The Motorcycle Diaries is unavailable to stream "
I'd post screenshots if you really doubt me... maybe they are available where you are?
Bullshit. I live in Australia where we can't "legally" get netflix. When I started using netflix/hulu/a few others with a vpn, my amount of torrenting hit essentially zero.
Well, I guess I'll try it again, but every few years I read that it's improved and it really hasn't. Maybe this time is the charm.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In France, a service called CanalPlay allows you to do just that for 6.99€/month. Once you're subscribed, you can watch TV shows and movies on your Set-Top Box, tablet/phone, Xbox, AppleTV or computer. I'm hoping for more openness to allow external applications (like XBMC) but for now it seems pretty satisfactory (I'm not using the service, myself, as I don't really watch movies, but I'm aware of it). The catalogue is not 100% complete though, and some movies (usually the best sellers) are not part of the subscription and are available only through VOD.
If you want to have Hollywood's entire back catalog available to you then there is simply no service that offers it
Understood, but there's little good reason for that. There should be several services with vast catalogs competing on service, and features, and all of them should have all the latest and most popular movies.
-- not your local rental store (if you even still have one),
If a blockbuster movie was recently released on video, it would be there. Period. It didn't matter whether it was Paramount or Warner Brothers. They had 40 copies of it. I wouldn't have to go to one store to find the latest Warner Brothers release, and an entirely different store to see a Paramount movie. And give up and buy the VHS tape of a 3rd blockbuster movie that apparently didn't get a DVD release at all.
Netflix doesn't work at all like that. Major block buster movies just never show up at all. Others show up and disappear at random and usually without notice. Still others are available... but not on netflix.
If I go to the local video store I KNOW they'll have a a few copies of the new Star Trek Into Darkness. I KNOW they'll have a pile of copies of Frozen. With Netflix I don't know. It might be there, it might be there tomorrow... it might never show up at all. No video store would sit around with there thumbs up there asses consistently completely missing 3 out 4 of the biggest movies released in any given year.
As the guy who doesn't know that the Academy Award is an Oscar,
Heh, I've taken some well deserved jibes over that.
I think you're being disingenuous when you pretend to care about it.
I readily admit I -don't- care about those awards; I don't watch the ceremonies, and I don't care what wins. I do however enjoy good movies, and it bothers me that lots of movies just don't show up -- and were' not talking oddball little movies that I happen to like but weren't a big deal. And this is where the references to the awards comes from: we're talking about movies that are a BIG DEAL to the mass consumer...and these aren't reliably showing up.
Can you imagine your local video store not having any copies of any of the Oscar winners for best picture from the last 5 years? Or out of the blue have some of them on the shelf for a week or three and then gone again never to return?
Several of those may not currently be on Netflix, but they have been in the past and may be in the future. The selection rotates
I understand that. But its ridiculous. Can you imagine if iTunes was like that? Albums just 'phasing' in and out of availability at random, most of the biggest and most popular, never showing up at all. I also understand its not netflix's fault, that these are the terms they're being dealt by the rights holders... but its STILL RIDICULOUS.
So what, Netflix isn't for you, but to argue that it's a substandard service is just asinine.
I have netflix. I like netflix. I agree its fantastic value. But at the same time it falls so far short of what a video streaming service really SHOULD be. The catalog should be growing, not rotating, and the most popular titles coming out that people want to see should reliably and predictably show up.
That's how the torrent scene works. So its clearly technically doable. And its where I go when netflix doesn't have what I want.
Netflix reminds me of superchannel really... tons of new movies every month, usually a few months behind theatre and DVD release... but if you just have superchannel after a while you start to realize you haven't seen half the movies your friends are talking about. Because 3 out of 4 really big movies never show up at all.
Superchannel used to be great value 15 years ago -- lot of good movies -- cheaper and more convenient then renting (read the guide, plan when to watch, or set the VCR, good times)... but it was still perpetually disappointing too. As big movie after big movie... just didn't show up.
That's netflix.
Sadly, some people merely consume. I call them cultural leeches, as mostly never give anything back.
Not everybody is capable of giving back, for at least three reasons. The first is inability to secure a license under copyright to prepare a derivative work and/or to secure errors and omissions insurance against having accidentally prepared a derivative work. Another is inability to secure a license to publish on a platform that has a gatekeeper, such as Blu-ray Disc (BDA/AACS cartel), set-top video gaming platforms (MSFT/SNE/NTDOY cartel), and handheld video gaming platforms with directional controls (SNE/NTDOY cartel). And finally, feature films and full-length video games have in general become far too expensive in time and money for one person to produce. I'd appreciate help working through these excuses.
Well most odd - I just searched for them too, and they're no longer on streaming. They were available a month or two back, as they were most definitely in my queue.
Netflix will pull movies/series time to time. Case in point, Buck Rogers Season 1 (still sad about that).
e’ll all face a complex decision tree when choosing what to watch, and we’ll have to settle for something less than ideal.
or get off our ass and go do something else
what's the problem?
"And even if you had netflix, you'd still pirate movies and tv shows. You'd just use a different excuse"
I have a dedicated seedbox outside of my country of residence that I use for torrents. Since getting netflix (where I take care of routing around the blockades to using it in my country of origin) my movie torrenting has dropped to an effective 0.
We have no tv signals coming into the house, and find that Netflix is more than good enough, and while we would like more, newer stuff, we find it's not worth the hassle (the hassles involved with finding and downloading the torrent, then waiting for it to arrive, then moving it into a categorised folder on the NAS that also streams to our TV via the PS3, and having to buy new, bigger hard drives every two years, deal with hdd failure, storage congestion, multiple copies of the same movie if my wife and I dl the same thing, segregating what is OK for us to watch vs. the kids to watch, etc...)
So, no. It's likely that he would not find another excuse to pirate.
Two (or four) words: DVD Plan.
"I love deadlines - I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by..." -Douglas Adams
For $10 a month you don't get everything you've ever wanted. That's like going to McDonalds and complaining about the lack of lobster on the menu.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
The analogy works, but only if you note that lobster isn't on any menu anywhere, at any price.
A service does not have to be comprehensive to be useful. It fails utterly if your expectation is "I want to be able to pull up any film that comes to mind." but works out well for "I want to let the kids pick something to watch and not be dinged for a $3-5 rental (or $15-20 purchase if rental is not an option)." or "I'm not sure what I want to watch right now. Let's browse around for a bit."
Disney is still bound to a contract with Starz, but Netflix will be the exclusive carrier for titles from Disney Animation, Pixar, Marvel and Disneynature starting in 2016.
And Dreamworks hasn't added their back catalog, but they announced last month that they will be developing three new exclusive series (King Julien, Puss in Boots and Veggie Tales in the House) for Netflix on top of the remaining commitment for Turbo FAST. Additionally, they have exclusive streaming rights to their recent theatrical releases (Mr. Peabody & Sherman, Turbo and The Croods).
Not bad for $8 a month. That said, I would love to see them expand to offer premium tiers with additional content. I could easily see an acquisition of or merger with one of the smaller content providers, possibly a previous partner like Starz or Epix. Or possibly partnering with content owners who would retain ownership and control of their content, but piggyback off the Netflix infrastructure and subscription base. For example, a niche service like Warner Archive could become a Netflix "channel" instead of a separate service.
But in the meantime, I will continue to appreciate Netflix for what it is rather than complain about what it isn't.
A service does not have to be comprehensive to be useful.
Agreed. But then I don't go around saying "netflix 100% satisfies my needs" either. Its useful, its great value. But it FAR from 100% satisfies my needs. (And yes that "100% satisifies" is a quote from the post that started this thread... if the OP had said "I like netflix, its useful and good value" I wouldn't have responded. I responded because he said it "100% satisfies" and it doesn't.
It fails utterly if your expectation is "I want to be able to pull up any film that comes to mind."
Not just that, because I wouldn't be disappointed if it was missing Blood Sucking Nazi Zombies, Threads, Hellraiser Hellworld, Metropolis (2001 japanime remake), Children of the Corn V, .... "any film that comes to mind" is a vast set.
The "complaint", such as it is, is that it fails utterly even if your expectation is the much more limited "I want to be able to watch any major theatrically film from the last several years, or any of the 'biggest movies all time' such as a the very limited subset of all movies that one would expect pretty much any half decent video rental place to carry."
Amazing!
http://de.mon.st/RyEq2/
I highly doubt you will ever get "any major theatrically film from the last several years" or "any of the 'biggest movies all time" for $8/mo.
This is a low cost subscription model, not a rental model. Think all you can eat buffet, not fine dining.
The playback is hopelessly choppy and it's a miserable movie watching experience, no matter what service you use. Silverlight is SHIT. It doesn't run on a mac. It just crashes. iTunes can't accomplish the simple task of the smooth playback of a movie. MORONS. IDIOTS. They can't cough up enough intelligence to perform the simplest task of playing a movie without it skipping and jerking and vomiting all over the room.
Get a Blu-Ray player and rent a real movie that will play back from beginning to end without all this idiotic pausing and skipping and jerking and lost frames. What a joke. And guess what? Blu-Ray movies are a mere $1.50 on RedBox! Whereas the rental is three to five dollars or more on these ripp-off streaming movie services. You can't get old movies, but if you want to watch old movies, buy them on Amazon. They're not much more than the rental price on these pathetic download venues.
Do yourself a favor and don't inflict this on-line movie watching nightmare on yourself. It's hopeless.
Blu-Ray rules.