Huh. It came in blank even after I put in the entire name. I was surprised.
I’m sure that’s true. As I said in the OP, I haven’t done any streaming at home in years.
Yes, that’s what I did and still do, as I said earlier. And I’m hearing what people are saying, but I’m still not liking where this is going (or is now) as far as ownership of media. Add to that I didn’t enjoy the streaming experience at my friend’s house.
Going forward, I think I’ll be looking for ways to secure my ownership of the media I currently have in my possession. Will have to research the practicality and legality of doing so.
What are you talking about? Are you worried the authorities are going to come to your door demanding you hand over your media content?
I’m talking about finding legal ways to continue ownership of the media I have now in some other form, or making sure I have a way to play DVDs in the future when they aren’t as common.
I didn’t know #1 wasn’t kosher. It sounds similar to what I did with my CDs years ago to continue ownership of my music collection (which I thought was legal). Was hoping to find ways of doing something like that with the movies and TV I have purchased, but that may not be an option. That’s what I mean by doing my research on this.
And while I’m not too worried about the feds crashing in on me should I inadvertently step over some digital line one day, I am trying not to advocate piracy as the mods have cautioned me.
I mean, I’m old enough I remember sharing some of the concerns of @Llama_Llogophile but I also…essentially learned to “get over” them. I was always a big adopter of home media, I was one of the first people I knew that had a VCR, back when buying new release tapes was like $70 or more (and this was in 1980s dollars.) I became a regular at the local video rental store, and would very occasionally buy some of the titles I liked the most, combined with sometimes recording (carefully editing out commercials) broadcasts of select movies.
Eventually I had a pretty nice VHS collection, and at that point in my life…I moved quite a bit, I was in the middle of a long military career and you move a lot, and along with my books and records, the big collection of VHS tapes was another thing I had to trudge along from place to place. I also had to worry about wear and tear, which anyone who used VHS tapes knows could be a problem.
Being the early adopter I am, when LaserDisc was getting big in the early 90s, I went whole hog on that, and while I maintained my VHS collection, I bought as many new releases on LD as I could. This was a new, high quality format that seemed the wave of the future, and I built out a good collection. Which…along with the VHS tapes, got to move with me from place to place. Then in the late 1990s DVD started to hit, which had a combination of quality, ease of use, price point etc that it was actually worth my while to replace basically my entire video collection, VHS and LD, with DVD (I maintained a few select titles on the old formats that were never released on DVD–in fact a few of my old LaserDiscs that are in storage have actually never been released subsequently.)
DVDs were a lithe format compared to LaserDisc and VHS, so while I now had an even bigger media collection, it was more size efficient. I would occasionally buy special editions, director’s cuts etc of movies I already owned just for the bonus content (I am a film buff.) I was proud of this huge DVD collection. Then HD DVD and BluRay come out…I give some pause here, because I was starting to get “format fatigue”, and I also was starting to strongly suspect we were going to fully digital ownership of media soon. I eventually went in on BluRay, but I deliberately did not replace my entire SD DVD collection, I upgraded certain favorites to BluRays, and bought new films on BluRay, but maintained both.
Eventually, sometime in the first half of the 2010s I realized physical media just wasn’t the way to go anymore. I didn’t like having to maintain hundreds of discs, I didn’t like having to manually sort through them to find a movie, better ways to maintain a library of content were out there and I embraced it. I went the route of ripping all my movies off disc and putting them on a media server and I used some common software to create my own media library. My understanding at the time, that while I was technically ripping my own content, is that this is not actually legal, and that the process of ripping the video files is actually a copyright infringement. I am not fully informed enough on the law to analyze the veracity of that claim, but let’s say I suspected my activity wasn’t entirely kosher. But because it was being used to stream content on my own home, private network, that I had already purchased once, I felt I wouldn’t get in much trouble for it.
Eventually I got tired of even doing that, and while I still have that media server, I actually opted for the convenience of digital ownership. I do a combination of digital ownership and streaming on demand. I also sometimes rent streaming movies.
I no longer feel any of the concerns you do in part because I think I’ve just “gotten over it.” I have a big library of owned media, on my iTunes account. Let’s be honest here, I can’t “take these films” with me when I die. I’m not an Egyptian Pharoah who believes I can carry them with me into a form of afterlife. Apple computer is…more than a going concern. I see little reason to seriously expect Apple doesn’t outlive me by many, many years.
There have been a very few, limited instances where content has been removed from an owned digital media library, but it is rare, usually over a legal rights dispute. A few of these digital media libraries have also shutdown, usually with varying ways of treating their customer. But most of my digital library is in iTunes…again, I don’t see Apple going out of business in my lifetime, and I think the reality is my content is pretty secure where it is. Probably more secure than the home server my ripped content is on (which could be destroyed through fire or etc–I do have a redundant RAID array so I’m protected from disk failure, but it isn’t backed up to the cloud, as I don’t care to attempt to backup terabytes of data on the cloud), it’s also a lot more secure than my old collection of VHS, LaserDiscs, DVDs and BluRays.
It isn’t always illegal, but it isn’t always legal, either. It depends (among other things, on whether what you’re ripping is copy-protected). There’s some discussion and links in this thread:
I could have gone downstairs and searched, it would have taken me twenty minutes all told. By spending $2.99 I saved that time. My time is worth more than $9.00 an hour.
I don’t agree with the friend’s attitude re “fuck’em”. A streaming service is basically the new “video rental” game, where you pay a fee to watch a specific video (or in the case of Netflix etc., a library of videos). Back when you went to Blockbuster and paid 2.99 to rent a VHS tape, that didn’t give you the right (moral or legal) to make a copy of that tape before you returned it.
What’s frustrating to me, much like the OP, is that there is both so much overlap, and so little, among the offerings. Some stuff, like Peacock Network, is available if you have a cable subscription - so I can watch most NBC stuff on my Roku since we have FIOS… but then there’s the other tier where the service only offers some things if you pay even more on top of it.
Services like Apple TV and Amazon Prime also confuse the picture by linking to other services such as Epix, Showtime and so on. So it’s easy to lose track of where the hell you are and whether you’re going to be prompted to pay more to watch something you thought was included.
The one thing I DO like about all the various services is that usually you can plunk down a month’s fee, watch everything you want, then cancel. We did that with HBO for Game of Thrones. We do it periodically with CBS All Access (or whatever it’s called now) to catch up on the various Star Trek series, and so on.
I will not “buy” a movie from a streaming service. What happens if the company goes out of business, or simply decides not to offer that service again. To be fair, it’s unlikely that Amazon or Verizon are rolling up the sidewalk any time soon, but I’d bet there’s something in the fine print that allows them to stop offering digital streaming in general, or a specific title, or they don’t like you as a customer (not unprecedented; Amazon got a lot of flack for stripping a customer of all her paid-for Kindle content) and they’ll respect you in the morning. If I did buy a movie, it would be if I knew I had a way to make a backup of the content.
One nice thing about our Roku is that if I know of a title I specifically want to watch, I can do a search from the Roku home screen - and it will tell me where that title can be found, across all the various services. Then if it’s a service I have access to, all good. I would imagine that various other streaming devices have similar searches.
Regarding owning content: How many movies / shows do you really watch more than once? Those are the ones you purchase. Everything else, you rent for 2.99, or watch as part of one of the bigger streaming services. If you DO own a title, then you have the quandary of whether to get it in “hard copy” (buying the DVD), or through a streaming service (with the caveats I noted), or doing something like that Plex server (I think), which is questionable from a legal standpoint.
The current rate of streaming is…perfect for my use case. I almost never watch something twice and there is more available to me on Netflix and Prime than I could ever need along with the occasional one month of binge on Hulu and HBO. I also have Disney+ for free because of my Verizon cell phone which is a shame because I don’t have any interest in Star Wars, superhero stuff or regular Disney content. I watched the Beatles thing and that’s it.
Yeah, I agree. I much prefer to watch new stuff than rewatch dusty old stuff for the umpteenth time. And streaming is great for that.
I am looking forward to streaming industry consolidation, if only because having multiple subscriptions is a pain in the butt.
They seem to be using similar copyright laws to software, in that you don’t own the software copy, you own the media that it’s on, or own a license to use the software, but the company owns the actual software itself, it being an intangible intellectual thing and all. E-books are similar- you may own a printed copy, but that doesn’t entitle you to a electronic copy, as it’s a totally different media/distribution channel, and the author/publisher owns the actual “book”.
So the OP still owns his DVD of “The Great Escape”, but if he wants to watch it somewhere else, he’s got to pay, because that’s a separate thing than owning a DVD, and it costs money.
Physical media is theft.
Not everything. it seems any new Marvel content will never be in a physical medium. Fortunately I got a grace period of Disney+ with my new phone, I hope I get through everything before I have to shell out for yet another service.
But my real complaints with streaming aren’t the money. It’s disappearing content, and altered content. I was watching season 1 of a show on Amazon. Old show. When I get to season 2, both seasons were gone. Poof. No warning (which Amazon could easily do. They track everything else we do.) I could buy it, but in this case I didn’t want to. It is unpopular, so on DVD it is more expensive and hard to find, and it doesn’t have as much repeatability as other things I like. I was happy with streaming.
And with the cost of storage, there’s no reason it had to disappear. This wasn’t the Godfather - the copyright holder should be happy anyone is watching it.
And the other is altered content,. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I think someday soon, streaming movies will be altered “for our own good”. No more guns in ET, no more smoking in Casablanca or other vintage movies, no nasty words or gratuitous nudity in 80s action movies. And us old farts that remember it used to be there will die off, and these movies will “have always been that way”. Oh brave new world that has such lies in it.
I have only “pirated” content once. I binged It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia last year and saw that they didn’t have three of the episodes available. They were canceled because they had blackface in them. I did a brief search on reddit and found a pirate site and was able to watch them. (I won’t give it out, don’t ask). That site is amazing. It has tv episodes minutes after they air and every first run movie with great resolution at least as viewed on my laptop.
By “in digital form” I meant not a physical medium.
My misread, Sorry.
The music rights issue sucks for everyone, that’s been an issue for a long time. Altered content can be a problem depending on who’s making the decisions. A director changing something, well, it is their film.
I don’t like the trend of deciding which TV episodes should be shown and which shouldn’t because there’s content that is ‘offensive’. My main problem with older shows is that comedy doesn’t age well. Sure some is based on old stereotypes, but also some is just ‘you had to be there’
Did you go for a few weeks without watching Amazon ?- because I’ve gotten about a month’s notice when a series I was watching leaves Amazon. But it’s when I open Prime- I don’t get an email or anything.
Here’s what I found on my 2 go-to sites for media I want to own or rent:
Alice’s Restaurant - $5 rent/$15 buy on iTunes
The Great Waldo Pepper $4 rent/$15 buy on Vudu (and $2 disc-to-digital conversion) and iTunes
The Aristocrats (the Penn Jillette documentary, not a cartoon) - streaming free on Vudu, $4/$10 on iTunes
Barry Lyndon - $3 rent/$10 buy on Vudu (and $2 disc-to-digital conversion) and iTunes
Baseball (Ken Burns documentary) - $46 on Vudu
Being There - $3 rent/$10 buy on Vudu (and $2 disc-to-digital conversion) and itunes
The Bridges at Toko-Ri - $3 rent/$10 buy on Vudu (and $2 disc-to-digital conversion), $4/$13 on iTunes
Fantastic Planet - $3 rent/$15 buy on Vudu, $4/$15 on iTunes
Harry and Tonto - nothin’
The Remains of the Day - $3 rent/$14 buy on Vudu. (and $2 disc-to-digital conversion), $4/$15 on iTunes
The Sunshine Boys - $3 rent/$11 buy on Vudu (and $2 disc-to-digital conversion), $3/$10 on iTunes
Wait, what? I see all of the newest MCU movies (the ones not in theaters) available on Blu-ray. Even this stinker.