@Just_Asking_Questions may be more referring to the Disney+ MCU TV series, such as WandaVision, Loki, etc., which don’t appear to be making appearances on Blu-Ray.
Sorry, I meant Wanda Vision, Hawkeye, Falcon and Winter Soldier, What if? etc.
Aha. Sorry.
I was born some 50 years ago. To watch any movie or show back then you would have to (1) wait until one of the 3 or 4 channels in your town broadcast it, or (2) wait for a movie theater to show it. And you had to abide by the schedule of the broadcast station of the movie theater.
About 10-15 years later, cable TV became available, so if you were a subscriber, then you would have access to say 10-20 more channels. Again, however, you would have to wait for one of those channels to put the movie on its schedule and then watch it when it was available.
About 10 years after that, home VCRs started becoming common. This was the first time you could watch something on your own schedule, but only if (1) you taped it off a cable or broadcast transmission, (2) a video rental outlet near you carried it, and you rented it for $2-$5, or (3) you found it available for sale. Originally, videotape copies of movies were in the $30-$80 range.
As videocassette became more common, the price started to come down, but still, something had to be offered for sale on VHS–and later DVD–for you to buy a copy and then be able to watch it when you wanted.
Now, there are about a dozen major streaming services that will allow you access to a library of works for a set price. Additionally, there are another dozen or so services that offer you their libraries for free (often with ads). Additionally, major services like Amazon and Apple allow you to rent or purchase digital copies of items available in their libraries.
This … this is “not great”? Are you kidding me? You have access to thousands of movies and TV shows, some of them for free, some of them for flat fees, and some of them for rental or purchase, and this is “not great”? Look at the history of access to movies and TV shows. This is more access than was ever conceivable 50 years ago, or 30 years ago.
Come on! You still what “exactly what I want, in the form I want, when I want”? Well, expect to pay handsomely for that. I really don’t sympathize with your dissatisfaction with the state of streaming.
I mostly agree with this, and am surprised there aren’t actually more services out there. Streamers like Shudder (horror movies) and CrunchyRoll (manga/animation) fill some very large genre gaps for people who consume those chunks. It’s largely a matter of the fact that a lot of those are produced by niche studios, so it’s easy to consolidate them. Paramount/MGM/Fox/Sony/Disney/etc. are always going to be less flexible and hold rights a lot tighter.
But I do feel bad for the sports fans out there. I live far away from my baseball team’s blackout area, so it’s very rarely an issue for me (Royals are only blacked out when playing in Chicago or Cincinnati for me in Indianapolis), and they usually don’t make it onto the ESPN Sunday Night games. But Yankee fans get screwed. I’m under the impression this is a result of YES selling game rights out to other streamers to get a bigger piece of pie, and the consumer is stuck. Regional sports broadcasters have been on the hot seat the last couple years for this shit, and they’re going to kill the goose sooner or later.
my years ago observation was eventually all of these little streaming places are going to merge and it’s just going to be a cableless cable company and were back to where we started from (unless they start selling internet services also)
What I wish roku would do is have a payment system so you could say pay roku monthly and then roku pay the various services for you because we auto pay for about 3-5 services for my cousin and I never remember which ones and when …
my dad was such an early subscriber of HBO that he had to have a specific cable installed to get HBO on ch3 and believe it or not HBO used to sign off at 2 am after the soft core nudie drive-in movie was dome (think "night call nurses or H.O.T.S)
I agree with this, though I think that the current landscape is best suited for the viewer who feels, “I want to watch good/enjoyable movies or shows, and I don’t necessarily need to watch any particular programs.” If that describes you, then subscribing to one or two streaming services will give you more than enough enjoyable content to last a lifetime.
Where it becomes complicated, frustrating, and unwieldy, and isn’t well-suited for a particular viewer need, is for the situation like in the OP, where the viewer wants to watch a specific show or movie, or a particular type of programming (particularly sports) and discovers that it is only available on yet another different streaming platform, to which they don’t already subscribe.
Again, the fact that such service is available at all is pretty damn great. And if your needs are that specific, it makes perfect sense that you would need to pay additionally for it.
Don’t Prime and Apple+ do this?
I think amazon does I we dont use apple anything ever … so i dont know
It’s worse for Yankee fans because they have 21 games exclusively on Amazon prime and they will only be available in the NY area - apparently Amazon has an ownership stake in the YES network. If you pay for YES network through cable, you won’t get them and if you are out-of-market and pay for an MLB package that gives you out-of-market games, you won’t get them. As far as I can tell, the rights to games on Peacock and Apple were sold by MLB like the ESPN games.
Amazon has to pay the copyright holder to make it available for streaming. If it’s unpopular and only a few people are watching it, what incentive do they have to continue shelling out for that license?
They could negotiate on a per-use basis. They only reason they don’t is because it was never done that way. But they didn’t do it that way because they couldn’t. The technology now exists to pay the rights holder each time the program is viewed.
Same with the overcome-by-technology music rights. Like WKRP and probably some other shows like Memphis Beat that are or were bound up in music rights. The music rights holders are shooting themselves in the foot. The rights holders want too much money, because the existing business model assumes the way it was is the way it will always be.
A company can license their music for use in WKRP at a fair price, and get some (but less than they want) money, or not license it and get…no money. Amazon can pay Universal a small but nonzero fee when I and the three other people in the country watch that old show, or they can get zero money. Universal can let it sit and rot until no one can see it. I guess that’s their right. But some small money is always better than no money.
If the amount is some fraction of a penny per viewing with ten viewings a year, it’s probably not worth it to fill out the paperwork or hire the accountants or contract lawyers.
But yet, record companies send small dollar value royalty checks to songwriters every year, and have for decades. If ASCAP can do it, so can Amazon. Or they can leave money on the table.
Point being, “money on the table” =/= “Enough money on the table to give a shit about”
I don’t bend down for pennies and have thrown away a handful of change in a junk drawer rather than sift through it.
But Amazon isn’t leaving anything on the table. They only lose money if people drop their subscriptions because they can no longer watch these unpopular shows, or if potential subscribers refuse to join because they won’t be able to watch those unpopular shows.
And if a show is a null value when it comes to attracting or retaining subscribers, then they lose money whether they’re paying a yearly licensing fee or paying on a per-use basis.
The other side of the coin is that it’s in Amazon’s interest not to have a bloated catalogue. It might be nice for a few hundred people a year to have access to a few thousand obscure shows, but the other 150 million subscribers have to scroll past those titles when they’re looking for stuff to watch. Quantity over quality is a legitimate criticism that Netflix has been facing in the last few years.
We know what a la carte means.
As a side note: we’ve seen Blazing Saddles a couple of times, including once on some kind of family-oriented network. Not only did they remove the occasional not-OK-for-broadcast word (pretty sure N… was not heard), but the scene where the cowboys are eating beans around a campfire, and kept having to stand up and fart. The sound effect was removed - which rendered the whole scene pointless.
With software, supposedly you have the legal right to make backup copies of the disc, which for movies (at least those on DVD / Blu-Ray) seems to be explicitly prohibited. Something to do with copy protection. I have zero moral qualms about circumventing that - though I don’t, simply because I have no interest in it, and can’t be bothered. It’s somewhat baffling to me though, as to why it’s legal to rip a CD but not a DVD (RIAA seems to have weighed in and said it’s OK for CDs, to load into iTunes or whatever). I actually started a thread on that topic, many years ago.
Yep - to compare that to a book: if you leave your hard-copy book at home, and want to read it on vacation, you have to buy another copy.
As far as other electronic media: as noted, Amazon has a history of wiping out readers’ libraries, or at least one book from the library:
And the infamous case where a customer had ALL her paid-for books deleted:
And, if you delete your Amazon account because you don’t want to do business with them any more, ALL your content goes away:
Amazon supposedly won’t delete purchased books that you’ve already downloaded to your Kindle, in that last scenario, but it seems like you’d never be able to read them again if your device dies.
All this is why I always make a backup of Amazon-purchased books.
It’s because CDs have no technological protection measures but DVDs do. It’s illegal to circumvent a technology that controls use of or access to a work protected by copyright law. If the CD technology had been created with technological protection measures, then that would apply to CDs too.