This is exactly what I do. And based on my experience at my friend’s house, I’ll continue doing that.
The “some years ago” was referencing when I made the comment, not a specifc period in time.
My “navigating” is searching for the thing on the Roku home screen. I searched for “the office” and it brought up 9 seasons of content, with 5 of them available for free on Peacock, where I could just highlight and click from the search and the box takes me right to Peacock and the season I want.
But if you want the DVD, you’re welcome to have it, streaming doesn’t take it away, if anything it makes DVDs less expensive as they have to compete against free streaming. I have some DVDs, and right now I’m pissed because I can’t find my Godfather DVD set, and the movie isn’t available for free, that I can tell.
If streaming is not for you, I would never tell you that you’re wrong, it’s not for you. But that doesn’t make streaming bad, we have more access to more content, quicker and easier than ever, I can’t imagine going back to watching things on a schedule, or having to select things to record on a DVR, and choose what to keep or what to erase… it’s barbaric!
I’m confused - is there some reason you can no longer buy DVD/Blu-ray versions? They do still sell them. I mean maybe the specific movies/tv shows you want to see are not available , but that’s nothing new. And owning it doesn’t mean you will literally be able to watch it anytime you want - you couldn’t watch The Great Escape at your friends house because you didn’t have it with you, right?
I think maybe this is your issue - because I can’t imagine there are many people who would pay for “The Office” on demand because Netflix got rid of it. Certainly not enough people for the industry to be planning on it .Maybe someone might pay for the last couple of episodes of a series , but in my experience when that’s happened, I’ve gotten a month of " SHOW is leaving SERVICE July 31" before it happens.
All of this.
I often find I can’t find what I want to stream available on any streaming service. For the popular blockbuster type stuff, it’s easily available, but that’s not what I’m usually interested in watching.
I’m not really complaining, but streaming doesn’t solve everything. If you have somewhat non-mainstream tastes, you’re likely to find big holes in what’s available to you.
I’ll second this. In my example, I threw out The Office and the Sopranos. But looking over my collection, I have some relatively obscure stuff. So now I’m curious… Here is a sampling of DVD titles I have. Could people who are good at navigating the streaming services tell me if these are available? And if so, how easily available? Meaning, how hard did you have to search; are they being streamed on more than one platform, only through paying on demand, etc?
Alice’s Restaurant
The Great Waldo Pepper
The Aristocrats (the Penn Jillette documentary, not a cartoon)
Barry Lyndon
Baseball (Ken Burns documentary)
Being There
The Bridges at Toko-Ri
Fantastic Planet
Harry and Tonto
The Remains of the Day
The Sunshine Boys
Any or all. This isn’t a challenge - I’m just curious.
what I wanted with ala carte years ago was the cable company to hand me the list of channels and say a plan for 100 channels for say 79.99 just I get to pick the channels …
Cutting the cord for us means that we watch 75% less content. The majority of made for streaming movies have the feeling of a bad 80’s movie. A lot of cartoons are weird. High on energy and low on dialog because it’s cheap to make in a place that doesn’t speak English. The regular shows never live up to the promise. They don’t invest in anything that would require money and they get cut after one season of building a story arc they won’t finish. They make the holiday movies PPV around the holidays. They advertise and let you search for movies that are eventually PPV. They let you search for content they don’t have.
There are websites that you can search for any movie or show and it will tell you if and where you can stream it. Here is one:
I’ve always said Netflix got really lucky in showing cancelled or finished tv shows people still wanted to see because other wise they were no different than blockbuster/hBO and their ilk
If they had the internet back when cable TV was invented I can only imagine it was also filled with confused threads like this one.
Have you ever paid to hear a song on a jukebox that you already own in some physical format? Kinda the same.
If the physical DVD isn’t convenient, then the $3 was reasonable enough to watch right then.
Nothing you said is factually wrong, but I’m regularly perplexed why people who seem to proudly opt to not use a given offering always think they are the ones who ought to start critiques like this? You’ve suggested many times that TV is not your thing. Cool…you do you. But why the hell is your opinion on the state of streaming something the mainstream consumer really needs to hear?
You posted in the Pit, so I’m taking a adversarial tone here in part because it’s allowed. I’m not actually bothered much, but it’s an observation.
I don’t flatter myself that anyone “needs” to hear anything from me. I’m sharing my opinion on our board and if nobody cares, that’s OK. It’s happened before - I’ll live.
But taking your question in good faith, I think my main concern is that the “ownership model” of media is threatened by the current streaming system. Seems to me there is an obvious incentive for those companies to discourage us from owning movies, TV and music so they can repeatedly re-sell it. I think that is “bad thing” and I’m inclined to push back on it. Again, if nobody else feels that way, fine.
It’s still possible to purchase movies, TV, and music, in digital form.
In the good old days, there were some things you could watch for free (i.e. braodcast TV), some things you could watch as long as they were offered as part of a subscription you were paying for (pay cable), things you could pay a bit of money for to watch once (renting videotapes and DVDs from video shops), and things you could pay to own a copy of and watch whenever you wanted (buying videotapes and DVDs).
But nowadays, it’s totally different. There are some things you can watch for free (broadcast TV, stuff that’s free online (often ad-supported)), some things you can watch as long as they’re offered as part of a subscription you’re paying for (i.e. what’s on whatever streaming services you subscribe to), things you can pay a bit of money to watch once (online rental of movies and shows), and things you could pay to own the rights to watch whenever you wanted (online purchase of a movie or a season of a TV show).
My wife likes to watch certain movies over and over, typically as background noise while she cooks (I prefer to listen to music). For those movies, we have purchased them and they are always available.
Here are three illegal activities, none of which I do and none of which I condone:
- Ripping your personal media to a personal server and streaming that material for your personal use.
- Getting the login information from a friend who has done #1 and streaming their media.
- Pirating media which you do not own.
#1, so far as I’m concerned, should be legal. If I own a DVD, streaming it for my personal use shouldn’t be illegal.
#3 is just simple piracy. Any huffing and puffing over how ‘onerous’ the market has become is justification to avoid thinking too hard about the fact that a crime is being committed. It’s not a crime I particularly care about - I’m not going to turn anybody into the feds - but it’s illegal in the same way jaywalking to avoid walking half a block is illegal. It’s a crime of rank convenience and there’s no way to put a noble spin on it.
#2 is a little more of a grey area. I tend to think of it as the modern equivalent of loaning out your tapes, but if I have a collection of several thousand movies and make them concurrently available to dozens of friends, it’s less defensible.
Anyway, the current trend of streaming feels like fragmentation, but it isn’t. We’re past that period and moving into consolidation that makes sense. When the big networks launched their rival streaming services, Netflix and Hulu still owned streaming rights for lots of very popular shows. They’ve been pulling their properties back, but they do have to wait for those contracts to expire.
Ultimately, I think this is good for consumers. It’s easier to make informed decisions when libraries make sense, and a la carte is what people have wanted for decades. And some of it is fabulous - the breadth of content on Disney+ is remarkable.
What feels bad is paying for a shitty service because it only has one or two shows that you actually want to watch. And even in those cases, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from canceling your subscription after watching an 8 or 16-week run of whatever show you’re interested in. Ultimately, I don’t think those services will survive. I’m looking at you, Apple TV+.
But how would you have watched those in the days before streaming? You either owned a physical copy, rented a physical copy, or got lucky because it was playing on cable. Renting a movie “on demand” is no less ludicrous or onerous a proposition than going down to Blockbuster was in the 90s, except that it’s a hundred times more convenient. I don’t understand your animus here.
The promise of streaming has never been “watch whatever you want whenever you want.” It’s been “gain access to a large library of titles that you can watch whenever you want.” By and large, that’s been delivered.
Going through your list on my Fire Stick, which has a universal search feature,
Alice’s Restaurant - movie n/a, PBS has a concert by Arlo
The Great Waldo Pepper - rent or buy from Amazon
The Aristocrats - free on a number of apps (Tubi, Roku to name two, r or b Amazon
Barry Lyndon - rent or buy from Amazon
Baseball - rent or buy from PBS
Being There - rent or buy from Amazon
The Bridges at Toko-Ri - unavailable
Fantastic Planet - Roku, Xumo, HBO Max, rent or buy from Amazon
Harry and Tonto - unavailable
The Remains of the Day - Pluto, Tubi, rent or buy from Amazon
The Sunshine Boys - rent or buy from Amazon
This kind of gets at the issue. These statements are all patently obvious and well trod ground. It’s pretty much the whole point of of the subscription model and the industry wouldn’t even try to deny it. It’s not “threatened”, its well and truly extinct already, has been for years. You being so outside the mainstream (and frankly years late to the discussion) is why this post feels like remedial learning. The world has already shrugged and moved on while you were off doing something else.
The Bridges at Toko-Ri - free on Pluto TV, pay to rent on many sources.
So from your list @Llama_Llogophile, two titles are not streaming anywhere. How would you have watched those titles 20 years ago? If you already owned them on DVD then you can own and watch them now. Was there ever a place you rented from that had every title you wanted at any time? I don’t think so. You were always limited by the selection of films that whatever rental place actually had on hand.
Claiming that “The current state of streaming is… not great” because some random obscure title from 60 years ago isn’t available for you is laughable.