Before that I was mostly using DVDs and satellite TV. I think it was around 2010 when streaming services became advanced enough to become my main source of television. But back then I think netflix was really about the only game in town for streaming. Netflix streaming existed before that time period, but it was mostly crap when it first came out. I don’t know if roku had hulu plus for free back then.
Is that around when other people switched to streaming?
I switched around September-October 2010 - I got a second generation AppleTV and . . . hmmm . . . modified it a bit to allow streaming of the early Hulu (back when it was mostly free) as well as Netflix, which had just finally started getting good.
(Note - the AppleTV was pretty terrible in those days, but had the huge advantage that it would natively share all the media on my main computer at the time. Streaming-wise I was much happier when the second gen Roku came out in 2011 and their devices have been my go-to choice ever since)
2003, maybe. Let’s say that my sources were somewhat unofficial. It would have been after Bittorrent was released in 2001, and also required some reasonably high-speed internet connection. That sounds like the right ballpark.
The last time I watched TV with any regularity was 1995ish. The alternative was mostly physical media, though I was using a TiVo at one point.
The huge, huge turning point was none other than this.
I found out about it purely by chance, a funny video I saw on a saw on a bootleg Beatmania IIDX machine (in brief, a truly awesome but insanely difficult music game series) that I felt the need to look up for some reason. Which immediately catapulted me into a gorgeous, electrifying, astonishing musical world that quickly became my world. I got completely absorbed by these singers and watched hundreds of videos in the first year alone. I was so into it I ended up buying nearly all the (increasingly cheap, lazy, limited, and way too freaking difficult) games.
Later, through one connection or another (YouTube is really aggressive with recommendations) I got wrapped up in this colorful, beautiful, continually-expanding world. I can’t remember a time so many artists of every stripe created so much memorable work for a single property.
There’s tons of other stuff I follow, of course (mostly educational and human interest…and TASVideos), but those are the Ginormous Two. Actually, in recent times the second has gotten a lot more ginormous than the first. Number of reasons, but allowing more than one damn character to become a superstar is a big factor.
I’m just about on the cusp. Free-to-air broadcasting still delivers a lot for my taste, and I use my PVR for “shift viewing”. However, for some reason the PVR tuner seems susceptible to some sort of occasional interference, but inconsistently and variably. So since I got a smart TV I have to use the various channels’ catch-up/on-demand apps (no additional subscription) to get a clean version. Some things are only available on the apps, so I’m using more of those, but I still go to the broadcast offerings first.
Soon, probably.
We have DirecTV (with essential DVR) for the majority of our video entertainment, but also have access to Netflix, Hulu, Prime video, and HBO Max. We watch a fair amount of stuff on those platforms (I hate watching NFL and MLB on these things, but that’s a rant for another thread) but they are not yet our “main source.”
As an aside, we completely lost internet access for a few days this week. Wow, a lot of things were impacted.
Ignoring the fact that cable and internet are basically the same thing these days, I’ll say a few years back when my wife finally decided to cancel the cable sub and rely exclusively on streaming services. I don’t even really watch TV (streaming or otherwise) but now the little bit of Youtube I watch is supplemented by TV streaming so it’s all internet these days.
If I drew a chart between 1990 and now I think you would see a steady straight line to 100% with perhaps a final spike a few years ago when I discovered Roku.
Now 99% of what I watch is a steaming service of some kind with perhaps a few old obscure DVDs thrown in the mix. Though now that I think about it I am not sure where the Blu-Ray player remote is.
I feel my days of using dvds and blurays as my primary media have a finite future. With the closing of Family Video two years ago, I lost my last good source for buying movies. It used to be that when a major movie, like Thor: Love and Thunder for example, was released, I could figure on buying a cheap used copy in a couple of months. That’s no longer the case. Nowadays there’s no video stores buying new releases so there’s nobody selling them down the road. And with this loss of supply, places that used to sell cheap movies like thrift stores and pawn shops are phasing out their stock.
For me it was more of a gradual shift from cable to streaming, but it did begin in 2010-11. 2010 was the year I got my first smart TV, then my sister logged into her Netflix account on it when she visited for Christmas that year. And of course she never logged out and I started watching stuff using her account, as one does. But like I said, it was a gradual shift. In the beginning, I’d check to see if there was anything on TV I wanted to watch, and if there wasn’t only then would I watch something on Netflix. Then I realized they had certain shows that were getting a lot of buzz that I missed when they first aired, go I got into the routine of watching an episode of, say, Breaking Bad on Netflix whenever there was nothing I wanted to watch on TV. And gradually there were fewer and fewer shows I watched on TV and more and more on Netflix and other streaming services.
I think it was 2008. I remember that I did the Blockbuster deal where you get sent DVDs in the mail and then return them to the store at your leisure. Netflix had the same idea but I mail them back, which was even better. Then Netflix automatically added streaming to my DVD plan, which at first was just a novelty because their streaming selection was much worse than what you could get sent as DVDs.
But then as more things became available on their streaming platform, I switched to that exclusively.
I started with internet video entertainment when I went to university in 2005 and got access to a huge amount of not-entirely-legally-obtained video shared on the campus network. But I’d say the transition to main source would have been in 2009, when I moved to a new flat and never bothered to set up satellite TV there. I had a DVD player then - still do, actually, but I don’t think I’ve used it since about 2013.
The shift started around 2008 or so. Then, in 2011, I moved into a 2nd floor apartment and didn’t even bother setting up my home theater. Since then, I’ve done everything streaming.
Around 2010 when I went to college, but not so much because I got acess to pirated media (which I had long before college) but because I lost access to my parents’ cable.