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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."
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!
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.
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?
Because it doesn't make the right people enough money for them to set that up.
Notice, this isn't about making money. Businesses can make money doing what you have asked for.
This is about making enough money. Greed.
Netflix is already delivering.
How did this BUL$4!T get posted?
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
Why would anyone want to stream something outside of sports?
From my own experience the quality of streamed services available to me, frankly, suck. They are either low quality, embedded in some kind of stupid player, or system resource hungry. Why would I want that when I could queue something up on a torrent, get a high quality rip that is encoded in a way that my raspberry can play it happily and it sits nicely into the lovely media centre interface I'm running?
I pay my money every year to get access to the motogp streams from motogp.com Every race I have to stuff around plugging my laptop into my tv and then making sure ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE is touching the internet. That way I can get their 720 stream and usually it doesn't have too many buffering pauses in it. If my wife decides to surf the internet on her phone at the same time then bam, buffering. It sucks. But it is the only option to watch the races realtime outside of a foxtel connection which I would never use for anything else.
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.
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. /movie to stream any video I want whenever I want?
Why can't I just pay $1
Well if the movie studios had their way, you wouldn't be able to rent movies cheaply on disc either. They have no interest in customer satisfaction, convenience, or affordability.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
And even if you had netflix, you'd still pirate movies and tv shows. You'd just use a different excuse.
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.
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.
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...
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most academy award winners? Not present.
Most Oscar winners? Not present.
Those are the same thing.
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...
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.
"2 dozen channels"
You must have missed the part of the article that laments the fact that "the future of digital TV and movies is destined to be fragmented across several services..."
If you have to hop between 2 dozen services to get to your content, whereas 'pirates' can get basically anything they want from one central location, that is where the media industry has failed.
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.
You can't pay $1 / movie to stream any movie whenever you want because that's not a sustainable revenue model.
Financially successful movies typically demand big budgets, and these same financially successful movies typically make the bulk of their return during the initial cinema run. This is followed by the home-theatre / pay-per-view release which aims to reach both diehard fans and untapped markets that value it enough to actually pay for it. Once that's been worn out it'll head for a second theatre release if there's demand for it, and finally head to broadcast syndication and public availability like Netflix. High budget programs that reach Netflix have already made over 95% of the revenue that they will make from program viewership; further revenue comes from milking bargain bin sales, re-releases, and branded merchandise.
Were media to go straight from cinema to general availability many titles would miss out entirely on very important sources of revenue, and this would render many niche and cult-classic films entirely unprofitable. Many high-budget films would survive (albeit at a much reduced profit) provided that they have a long and successful cinema run, but quality titles that don't generate significant consumer awareness due to smaller initial market demand will simply fail miserably.
The media industry has a cunning plan, you see. Rather than give the customer what they want, they'll sue anyone who tries to bypass the complex system their incompetence and greed has generated.
Always remember, no matter who wins or loses, lawyers win.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
I dont think this is really the problem. I'm on a mid range ADSL2 connection and Netflix streams fine for me, as does youtube and most silverlight based sites (Silverlight was a misconcieved technology that nobody wanted, but to its credit, its video streaming worked exceptionally well).
The problem is straight up the fact that some of what I want to watch is on Netflix, some of it is on hula and yet more is just straight up not available.
Unless I use Pirate bay.
If the industry wants people to stop downloading unauthorized copies, maaaaybe they could consideri doing like them music industry did and fixing this. I havent downloaded an unauthorized mp3 in years because iTunes and spotify just work.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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!
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 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.
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.
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*
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.