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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."
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.
Did I just read two stories today, telling me both the problem with DVDs and the problem with streaming services?
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.
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!
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Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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...
"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.
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.
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.
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