Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Poob has it for you.by zanecodes
- It’s on Plex. It’s all on Plex. (Or Jellyfin, if you prefer.)
Piracy in the 90s and early aughts mostly didn’t solve for price so much as for distribution and availability.
by Arubis - by deejaaymac
- For a time, it was popular for movie trailers to end with a domain, often of the form "${ $TITLE }film.com", which would take you to the marketing site for that release. Nowadays there's a whole TLD specifically for movies.
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.)
by cxr - Any show I've googled has a widget at the top right showing me where it is, if it's included in my current subscriptions, and how much it costs without one.
It's been getting confused lately about arrangements like "Paramount+ via Amazon Prime", but it still works pretty well.
by drc500free - How does Google know what subscriptions you have?by jimbokun
- It's on my media server. Forever. Where did it come from? Content negotiations are not open to public scrutiny. Thank you, good day.by r0ckarong
- What subtitles does it have? Any you want, regardless of where you are, where your residency is or your citizen status.
- We need an updated version of this:
- The thing that got me back into pirating is having to pay extra for 4k. When every bit of extra enjoyment is taxed it just kills my joy. Like a lot of people in this thread I really would much rather just pay for a good product than pirate. Thanks to steam I haven't pirated a video game since I was a teen.by pippy360
- Streaming in 2026 is a disaster, I'm happy to pay but piracy is just easier.by mrhottakes
- I’m amazed that after watching what the music industry went through, that the movie and TV industries haven’t figured it out yet. Have all the content on all the services, and let people pick which service integrates best with their life. This would dramatically reduce piracy, basically overnight, yet they all keep fighting to try to “win”, but it’s not a winner take all system.by al_borland
- Thanks to Jellyfin + Infuse (on AppleTV), even family and visitors have no trouble using my "streaming service". And I can reach it on the road with TailScale. Takes me laughably little time per year to manage (maybe an hour in a normal year, perhaps two or three relatively "hands on" hours in a year I modify the zfs disk pool in some way)
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.
by readread - > There are probably a few ways to improve things. Cross-platform search should be standard by now. A shared watchlist across services would help.
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.
by fckgw - I find that it's actually more annoying than it is usefulby dylan604
- Netflix is the only major service that doesn’t seem to play well, but services with sub-services (especially Amazon) don’t take into account your subscriptions when announcing what they carry and others (like Hulu) advertise stuff you can’t view at all.
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.
by NetMageSCW - Most people think of the loss of Steve Jobs passing in terms of Apple product design.
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.
by jimbokun - While it shouldn’t be necessary to resort to third party services to resolve these issues, it’s worth noting that JustWatch will tell you where a movie can be found and Letterboxd (among others) will give you a somewhat more clunky unified watchlist.by BryantD
- If you put your unified watchlist on JustWatch, they will even notify you when something you want to watch becomes available.by kej
- As far as "third party service shouldn't be necessary", is it that different from getting the TV Guide in the 80s or 90s to find out when a show was going to be on TV?by acheron
- Usually Justwatch should be able to tell you where something is available. However I will note that it's remarkably common for something slightly old to just not be available anywhere. You cannot watch Das Boot in my region on any service so far as I can see. So I guess you loan from the library or buy DVDs off of ebay or something?by tormeh
- I love JustWatch and most of the time it's given me the answer I need.by atonse
- Justwatch for me is just showing "Stream this or pirate it?"by MattGrommes
- What the courts did to the studios back in the '40s should be done today. Your company can either commission/produce original content OR you can be a distributor OR exhibitor. Only one.by linksnapzz
- Ok. Now two companies with similar board members enter in to an exclusive licensing deal.by kridsdale1
- I've advocated for this exactly. For alcohol it's called the three-tier system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-tier_system_%28alcohol_d...by graboy
- > The original promise of streaming was simple. Everything would be available whenever you wanted it. You could sit down in the evening and binge an entire season without waiting a week for the next episode.
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.
by advisedwang - I find the 2 being framed as fault of "us" weird. It seems completely normal to me to want to read a specific book rather then "just some" or see a specific movie rather then "any movie will do".
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.
by watwut - > 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.
#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.
by baubino - >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.
>(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.
by why_at