That's not how I remember it. Streaming services never had everything. The promise was: there would be something you would enjoy.
There are two reasons why this isn't working for us:
1. They've cut costs and over-optimized on engagement and now frequently a streaming service will literally not have anything you want to watch.
2. We've started expecting "must-see" shows and movies. You want to watch The Pitt, and then are mad that you need to get HBO or whatever and can't just watch it on Netflix. Perhaps you could browse Netflix and find something you'd like, but you have your heart set on a specific show.
Obviously (1) is a failing of the streaming providers, but I think (2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good.
If you subscribed to Netflix back then, you probably subscribed to both the streaming and the disc-mailing plan, because there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps.
>(2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good.
I don't think this is it. People just want to be able to watch things without too much hassle and without paying too much money. Some people will enjoy following the latest trend, but there are always many more people not watching any particular show than are watching it.
The fact that torrents make it so much easier to find what you want shows that there's nothing technically difficult about this. It's all caused by stupid profit incentives which make the consumer experience so much worse than it needs to be.
#2 is because streaming companies made a promise that they couldn’t live up to — namely, that subscribing to their service would essentially be tv on demand and we could watch the best tv had to offer without the limited scheduling of over-the-air broadcasting. Well, it turns out that one of the great benefits of network broadcasting was that everyone could watch the same show because everyone had access to the broadcast. The streaming companies are expecting subscribers to watch what’s on their service just because it’s on their service, which is exactly what regular broadcast tv had forced everyone to do. Streaming offers the option to watch anytime but not the option to watch anything, even thought that was in fact part of the original promise.
Watching things because a friend praised them or because you seen a good review or because you liked it and want to re-watch is no more "the bad herd following" then mindlessly opening Netflix and clicking whatever it recommends.
In a different world where rightsholders didn't get to set their price, then this would be possible. That world is bittorrent ;)
Apple tried this with the TV app on their AppleTVs. It was supposed to pull all your subscriptions into one interface, searchable, with tracking and watchlists and all that good stuff. One unified app to all your content.
Then Netflix said they weren't going to play ball, so most others refused too, and now it works with only like 1/3 of streaming services out there.
My main motivation for having it is easy access to several things that can't be had legally at all (the best very-close-to-opening-day Star Wars movies in the 4k77/4k80/4k83 series, or uncut Beavis and Butthead episodes, or Northern Exposure with the original music, to pick a few examples) but once you've got it, adding everything to the server is arguably less effort and lost time than using a half-dozen streaming services.
I'd much rather pay, I dunno, $50/month or something for a service that had everything on it, but that doesn't exist, so I have this instead. It's a ton better than a pile of streaming services that are still missing most stuff, plus force you to play the ridiculous "which one had this, again?" game.
It's been getting confused lately about arrangements like "Paramount+ via Amazon Prime", but it still works pretty well.
It's a shame that isn't a norm for you to be able to plug a URL into a reader that consumes application-specific RSS (à la podcast clients) for the express purpose of giving notifications when that film is available (either for rent or by subscription) on a new platform.
(Ideally, of course, the media itself would be self-hosted, so you could paste the URL into e.g. VLC and encounter a platform-neutral way to negotiate payment directly with the distributor (or not and just get embedded ads—à la podcasts) and then you're off to the races.)
Piracy in the 90s and early aughts mostly didn’t solve for price so much as for distribution and availability.
And it’s in blissfully high bitrate 4k! Anyone else notice that even the high quality options of streaming services are compressed to hell?!!
I have a Hisense TV with Roku interface. I was always able to search a movie and it'll tell me ways to watch. Being a data engineer, I sometimes wonder how that data is collected and aggregated.
- my imdb watchlist with completed items runs more than 1000 movies long
- my incomplete is another 1000+ movies
- i have never used a single streaming service in my life yet
- torrented every single one of them
- if a movie is spectacular, i ll watch it at the theatre
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The ads are what get me.
Ecosystems are either too fragmented or too monopolistic. Complain, complain, complain. Speaking of monopolistic, just google it guys, google knows where the movies/shows stream, that is your unified interface.
In this case, it's actually both at the same time! No, for real, that's why it sucks so bad, both of those things are simultaneously problems with the streaming service market.
Another poster in this thread has already posted my personal preferred solution, which is to do the same thing we did to movie studios and movie theater ownership for many decades, ending only a few years ago: ban combined ownership of both production and distribution.
It wasn't until studios caught on to the fact that streaming was going to significantly eat into cable subscription revenues that they began pulling their licenses so they could start their own streaming services.
I remember ads that exaggerated things that suck about rental stores. One of them was about all the cool movies being thrown out and replaced with 30 copies of Pony Adventure 4. They never explicitly stated that Netflix will always have the solution to those problems forever, but they implied it as hard as they legally could.
That's true today, Netflix just misses those gaps outright now.
It was only after their success did all the other producers feel comfortable that this was the future, started building their own apps, and then had to wait for their exclusivity contracts they had given to Netflix expire.
There was a lot of fear around what would happen to Netflix when those contracts would expire, and that’s how we started getting their originals like Stranger Things.
We're actually back to normal. TV before streaming was A LOT of reruns, trashy talkshows/reality TV, soaps and quiz shows.
IMDB Top shows ratings https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/ - the bulk of the top for scripted series are cable shows (especially HBO)
RottenTomatoes fan picks https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/rt25-fans-top-tv-... - very similar list
Hulu was created at the same time, and launched in the same year as Netflix's streaming service, specifically to compete with less-convenient pirated streams of current-run TV with a free-the-next-day-with-ads alternative. And that stuff was never on Netflix at the same time.
High-profile not-on-Netflix-streaming-for-first-run things from the 2007-2014 time frame: The Office, Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, and honestly basically everything else broadcast and cable made during "Peak TV." It was big news and considered a big bet when Netflix debuted their own high-budget first-run content with House of Cards, because of how weird it was to see Netflix competing in the brand-new show space.
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That's why you got things like this: Universal (NBC) produced House; Fox aired it. Touchstone/ABC produced Scrubs; NBC aired the first 7 seasons. Brooklyn 99 was made by Universal, aired on Fox originally. Modern Family was made by Fox, broadcast on ABC.
(The vertical integration today even extends to exclusive deals with those show-creators to try to prevent that too. Which isn't exactly great for quality either.)
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You could say that’s not dissimilar to a person having basic cable, while the TV Guide also shows all the premium channels, but in this still feels different.
In a way it’s what people asked for, but not really. With cable, people were bothered by paying a high price when they only watched a few stations. They wanted the ability to pick and choose for a lower price. Now we can pick and choose, but there is too much overlap in content, so it ends up being more expensive to get it all. It’s not like there is a service for sitcoms, another one for drama, sports, music, etc. They are all trying to do a little bit of everything. This isn’t what people actually wanted.
However the loss of his talent for business negotiations was at least as great a loss for Apple. He negotiated deals to get almost the entire recording industry onto iTunes. He convinced AT&T to sacrifice control of devices on their network to get an iPhone exclusive.
Maybe he would have found a way to convince Netflix to integrate their content into Apple TV.
The idea is excellent, individual provider’s implementations often suck, but since the Netflix app is so very terrible, they could really use full Apple TV integration.
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