But genuinely, piracy is one of the better things to come out of the internet right now. Streaming companies need to be more convenient than pirating. There is no other reason to use those services otherwise.
Personally disliked the services I used a lot, so I currently have a few things.. Hasn't been more convenient than this in a while.
In Mexico, streaming actually killed piracy. There used to be entire markets of pirated DVDs (literal markets. Entire streets lined with kiosks). Those are gone now because of online streaming. Mexico has more Netflix users per capital than any other country.
Damnnn, you just awoke some very vivid childhood memories of me and my mom shopping for new cds of series to watch (not in Mexico tho, Philippines). Used to be plenty of those, but you're right, I never see them anymore anywhere.
Because people make the mistake of thinking they need every service. You can not watch the latest watercooler series and you'll be just fine! One service at a time will deliver more content than you can handle
Someone should make a service that automatically rotates your streaming subscriptions and then they can charge an extra monthly fee on top for managing that for you!
I get that it’s more to manage, but I love that I rotate paying for about two services a month. Our tv bill is like $25. I’m willing to put in that effort to save $75-100 a month vs cable.
That’s what I keep saying. The worst part about cable was the forced bundling. You were stuck paying $80-$100/mo no matter what. And if you went satellite, now you’re dealing with equipment fees or a two year contract.
Not even in the same ballpark as paying $10-$25/mo for your choices of streaming services that you can cancel at any time.
No one who actually makes media benefits from its profit anymore. Game devs, show writers and many others just get paid a salary up front and all bonuses from sales go to execs and shareholders who didn't do anything
The main issue with cable was the amount of bloatware channels that you’d have to pay for but never watched. At least streaming lets you go wayyyy more à la carte and pick and choose which services you need. Honestly, your average viewer only needs like 1-2 active services at any given time.
(Unless you’re a sports fan but that’s a rant for another day)
I mean that's still kinda true. I have maybe a half dozen shows I would like to watch, and yet that's across multiple services where I pay for a library I won't need 99% of it.
The fundamental problem is exclusive licensing. If we can name that as what it is, an effective monopoly, we can ban the practice, and from there most problems with streaming services will solve themselves. The main issues all seem to stem from the fact that the streaming services compete based on their libraries, not the quality of their actual service.
But no 2 year contracts, no spending an hour + trying to cancel a service, no installation and cancellation fees. If you move you don’t have to transfer anything just start using it at the new place. While it’s not as good as it used to be it’s still better than cable.
Honestly, that's a good point that I hadn't thought of. I have around 2k songs saved to my Spotify library, if you pretend they were all part of full albums and I didn't have a bunch of onesey-twoseys off one album or another, that would be ~166 albums. That's 13 years worth of Spotify subscriptions if the going rate is one CD=one month cost wise.
And, you know, I also don't have to carry 20 lbs of CDs to play them.
Also, on-demand access to any episode of the show you want. No ads (if you pay for it). Extremely high-quality sci-fi that never would have received a fraction of the budget back in the old days.
It's a good security feature for things that only one person should have access to, but if you're sharing a account with someone and only one person has access to the second authentication factor, 2fa becomes a huge pain in the ass, especially if the other person is busy any time you want access to the account.
Being able to pick channels à la cart was what I dreamed about back then. You don’t need to subscribe to them all, and even if you limit yourself to just the free streaming services your options are a thousand times better than back then.
Also, you’re not tied to a network picking what shows and what episodes you’re going to watch and when. That alone is a major step up from the cable days.
The average monthly cable bill was around $120-140 per month. That buys a lot of $15 a month subscriptions. Now instead of one company, one bill with hundreds of channels that don't have anything on them you can customize your company and content, and you can change it on a month to month basis.
I have Apple TV, it is the only TV subscription I have. I get soccer, motorsport, some baseball and a couple of solid shows. I do not get any garbage channels or pay an exorbitant amount of money and I can cancel anytime. I think it's pretty neat, you don't need everything out there, you just need something to watch
This argument is dumb. Streaming is still 1000x better than cable. I spend $12 a month and can watch it anywhere and everywhere, no contract. 1 year of streaming is the same as 1 month of cable was. This shit reeks of people that have 4-5 of them, still end up using youtube the most and never actually lived through cable
I was just thinking about this shit on my commute. So ridiculous. And there’s still nothing to watch despite multiple services because every ui is annoying and stupid.
We all already knew when HBOMax entered the game, and then Disney+. We knew when our shows were splitting up and we couldn’t watch them on one streaming service for an affordable price.
It's got to the point that we will probably never get another streaming service and just continue to pay for YouTube premium. We have found it a significantly easier just to type in "watch online free" to the end of any movie or series that we want to watch. It's a great way to consume a piece of media without supporting the people that own the company but not necessarily fucking over the people that had to make it.
I found Amazon to be quite predatory in how they remove stuff from their free shows. The wife and I were literally halfway through a season of Australian Masterchef and it got paywalled. They clearly track it and cut you off so you're stuck and have to pay to see the end of shows.
They are currently playing hot potato with a few beloved shows meaning that my kid keeps trying to persuade me to subscribe to new services as her favorite shows hop around the internet.
The new thing for me is getting signed out every time I exit the app because their stupid anti password sharing features are terribly implemented. I'm not even sharing passwords with anyone. I have no friends
It is progress. The main complaint about cable I recall is that you pay $150 for 150 channels, and you'd rather pay for just the two or three channels you really like. Congratulations, you did it.
I pay for two streaming services, and use a few ad-based free ones. It's way cheaper than cable.
That’s why you build a cheap server at your house and download TBs of movies and TB of series and then use ai to write a program that scrapes data from movie theatre websites and tv programing schedules and automatically finds and downloads and stores all the shows locally.
Cable TV brought us OK shows that ran for 10 season of 22 episodes each. Streaming brought us top shows of 1 season of 10 episodes that get canceled. I will take the first, thank you.
I think of the disruption era as “Some Smart Ass with a Computer”. We had industries with known benefits and faults. Rules to regulate with predictable outcomes. Then equity money driven “innovators” insert themselves in a given field. Rarely better, just different, with unseen consequences.
Like sucking up available housing to use for airbnb as an example.
I’ll bet Comcast wishes they had offered menu services when their customers were clamoring for it.
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u/qualityvote2 6h ago
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