[JTbane]

>People hated being locked into packages and this is basically the same thing - you need the "NBC" package for The Office or the "CBS" package for Star Trek. I can't be bothered to spend all that money.

At this point it is very tempting to go back to good, old-fashioned torrents of TV shows.

[quicklyfrozen]

It's certainly a hell of a lot easier to not have to think about where to find your favorites. And once it's downloaded there are (almost) never any playback issues.

[bamboozled]

It’s laughable to me that after all the years of investment and business development in these steaming services it’s still much, much, much easier to use p2p networks to get content you want.

I wonder if there would just be more profit in injecting advertisements in tv shows and distributing them openly using BitTorrent? Think of the size of the audience, yeah people will cut the ads out but a lot of people couldn’t be bothered.

[TremendousJudge]

The fact that 15+ year old tech developed by some hobbyists (over asymmetrical networks not optimized for it mind you) provides a better service than anything modern corporations can deliver really is amazing to me.

[TallGuyShort]

It's because the corporations aren't really interested in providing a better service to the viewer, they're interested in providing a better service to their advertisers. That said, the idea of embedding the advertising freely is an interesting one, and I wonder if it's been seriously considered by the networks. Probably harder to convince the cheque-writers of the value they're getting, though.

[sombremesa]

> It's because the corporations aren't really interested in providing a better service to the viewer

I sold all of my Netflix stock (which wasn't a huge number anyway) the moment I saw that you could no longer see reviews of content on Netflix. It was a clear cut sign that they no longer "get it".

[mancerayder]

I hate to say it, but I miss the reviews+DVD days, where I discovered a huge wealth of foreign directors and their films. And there was even something exciting about DVD envelopes arriving in the mail aftet a short wait, building out the queue that would last a few months, and mailing it back wasn't a nightmare.

The loss of ratings was a telltale sign it'd gone mainstream and impersonal, but another one was the autoplay, which cannot be turned off. That's incredibly obnoxious, and loud, as previews somehow always seem to be.

Is this all an inevitable consequence of growth and the evolution of mass content or a set of bad decisions?

[praxulus]

Netflix and HBO don't have advertisers (well, except as providers, but not as customers).

[cyborgx7]

That is just wrong. The amount of product placement in Netflix original content is staggering.

[res0nat0r]

Free is always going to be more attractive and excuses made by folks who don't want to pay for services.

Netflix/Prime/HBO/etc all work perfectly fine, just sign up once, login, and that's it.

Folks are just using this yet again as an excuse to not want to pay more than $10/month for every tv show and movie ever made, but that's not sustainable. It was obvious from the start that folks who wanted to cut the cord and buy content piecemeal would just have essentially a Comcast subscription with 1/10th of the channels, for the same price in the end.

[bamboozled]

Folks are just using this yet again as an excuse to not want to pay more than $10/month for every tv show and movie ever made

This is absolutely not accurate.

These streaming services lock you into a specific catalogue of their curated material. There is absolutely no way the statement you made about having access to everything is true. It's also especially less true if you're not living in the US. For example if you're a foreigner in a or regoin country, you're access to certain content is often limited.

With p2p sharing, none of this is a blocker.

Then there are other strange developments, let's take the fact that nearly every good album on Spotify now has only the "Remastered" or "Deluxe" editions available for streaming. I don't remember that being part of the deal when signing up. Now I'm forced to listen to sub-par versions of albums.

Who knows, maybe in 40 years will be thanking people who preserved Terrabytes of original content for the world to access?

[res0nat0r]

> With p2p sharing, none of this is a blocker.

Of course it isn't, because it is illegal and free.

> "Remastered" or "Deluxe" editions available for streaming. I don't remember that being part of the deal when signing up. Now I'm forced to listen to sub-par versions of albums.

This has nothing to do with Spotify, it is for example when the entire Led Zeppelin original master tapes get remastered in the studio by the label, and they re-release old mono albums or older albums in a better fidelity format then when they were recorded years ago thanks to technological progress.

[thatguy0900]

I think the only thing that would work that way would be product placement. The problem would be one person cutting out ads and reuploading it, there'd be no reason to watch the original

[pessimizer]

> one person cutting out ads and reuploading it

Nobody would care enough. Canada (CityTV?) has those oldschool banner ads that appear at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds and disappear; those work for p2p, too.

Maybe the answer for content producers is banner ads and product placement, and posting their own content for free. Crawls would be cut out, full screen commercials would be cut out, but nobody cares about unmoving, temporary things, or the kind of car the character drives.

I'm starting to have a vision of video production as catalog. I wouldn't mind there being a site where I can find out what couch that was in the opening scene, or where the main character got that shirt the spy at the bar complimented her on. Having a site for it might give you some metrics to judge the product placement with.

Would it be so bad for Ikea to have a few sitcoms where everyone moves through rooms filled with Ikea stuff? Isn't that how free-to-air TV used to work?

[afiori]

except if you publish it properly yourself, a company that would embrace torrents as distribution method and took care of putting it on the relevant site would effectively solve the trust problem that is inherent in choosing a torrent between many.

[ianai]

Why not just edit the video codecs to support calling out to advertisements? Maybe offer people the option to watch the ads at start, end, or usual positioning, too. There would be abuse, but if it were done correctly the abuse wouldn’t be more than current.

[afiori]

My first reaction would be video player support. You would almost need to force a plugin for that.

Something slightly similar could be to distribute an offline player that is the only one that can play your content and that enforces some kind of advertisement.

But I would be of the opinion that it is better to go all-in in this kind of pivots

[NullPrefix]

Do you seriously expect someone will go the length of covering all the Ford logos in a car movie? That is the thing about product placement ads, when done correctly, the ad is part of the content.

[jrnichols]

i thought that as well, but there are still some hoops. or in the case of most of the apps for the Fire TV sticks, a new hurdle - unstoppable full screen video advertisements. i've noticed that releases of things like Popcorn Time have slowed down tremendously but Terrarium/cinema/etc for the fire sticks has picked up a lot. and they all have built-in ads now.

just interesting to me how the scene has changed.

[boznz]

advertisements generally only make sense in the country of origin, the adds would be pointless for anyone else

[eikenberry]

But there is a difference in that you aren't locked into things the same way you were locked into cable, where it was all or nothing. You can subscribe and unsubscribe to different services at different times as you wish. Given you get all the content available during your subscription why would you stay subscribed to all of them all the time. Just subscribe to the ones that have the shows you want to watch at that time and cancel all the rest.

[cgriswald]

Sure. So I subscribe to Amazon for The Grand Tour, the girlfriend subscribes to Netflix for Marie Kondo, the kids subscribe to NBC for THe Office and Disney for Disney stuff, and Mom subscribes to CBS for Star Trek and now I’m back to basically paying for cable for the five shows we want to watch right now, with the added convenience of worrying about dropping and adding subscriptions for as long as it takes these services to figure out a mechanism to prevent this behavior.

[Mirioron]

Or better yet: just don't watch them. There's plenty of entertaining content on YouTube, twitch, dailymotion etc.

[tzakrajs]

If you don't have private tracker access, usenet is probably best for speed and content availability since usenet providers have insane amounts of bandwidth to spare and there are publicly available nzb sites for searching usenet.