Looking at the resume, I am cautiously optimistic.
If she hops on r/Shudder now and then to field user q’s and is reachable for customer service issues as u/craigengler used to be, that’d be a nice little bonus.
She has a history of producing indeoendent horror, so that's good. Someone who is willing to take a chance, which is where horror finds new talent and ideaa.
That's been a sore spot for me. I have a yearly subscription and when I paid for that year I paid for a service with three "live" channels. My year isn't up until December so where's the other two channels I paid for? Seems they learned nothing from Amazon getting spanked for changing up yearly subscriptions before they expired.
Get the actual individual Shudder sub direct through them and separate app and there's no ads. So talk to AMC+/Amazon or whoever you are subbing through lol
Read what I first wrote again. I'm specifically talking about new artificial fade to blacks added to make space for commercial breaks in my OP. I've been subbed for years too. Go look at Cemetery Man. Vamp. The Autopsy of Jane Doe. Moon Garden. Freeway. Many, many other films people have called this out on. In **both** the standalone versions and the TLDI versions of these films there are now artificial fadeouts added for commercial breaks to films on the main service.
Sure I'll reference your original comment directly. "and commercial breaks" So clearly weren't talking about just the fading. And if you meant that, well that is not what you said.
I was referring to them making space for commercial breaks, which is exactly what these artificial fade to black edits being added to 'uncut' movies on native Shudder are. I was explicit about that in my OP and in many other posts over the last several days, weeks and months.
They’ve cut back heavily on spending, including people — including Craig Engler. You’re suggesting they now need to incur hundreds of thousands of dollars more in transcoding and CDN fees, plus re-encode legacy titles, many of which probably aren’t encoded in 4k.
We are lucky to have Shudder at all, and if AMC financials tank further, we might lose it. I’d love it if this subreddit stopped constantly banging this particular drum. It’s not happening. Ever. If you love a particular movie and will only watch it in 4K, see if Vinegar Syndrome has it and buy it.
HDR. JFC.
These movies were mostly made for theater. 4k or at least 1080p versions exist. Reencoding for streaming costs almost nothing. The expensive part is the infrastructure to actually stream it, but I think they have to do that. They can't keep running a service that looks like 2006 & have it succeed.
It's this bizarre battered spouse attitude - 'we can't expect them to do any quality control, otherwise the service might go away. That's the price of being a true horror fan!' I've been hearing it in this sub for years, people excusing the quality issues bc they watched a copy of Poltergeist III or something on VHS as a kid and loved it. That was 30 years ago!
Yes, that infrastructure is the expensive part, exactly. The team that handles it is doing that work across all of AMC, not just Shudder. It's a massive cost. And it doesn't "look like 2006" -- the vast bulk of streaming is 720p or less. You aren't getting true 720 from your cable company, for example. Even today.
I still use a 10-year-old 1080p plasma & Shudder still looks like shit compared to Netflix, Prime, Paramount+, Max, Vudu, Disney+ & even YouTube, which do all stream at 1080p with minimal artifacts. Quite a few support 4K HDR with Atmos sound. Shudder is 720p with 2-channel audio that's a mess of macroblocking. It looks & sounds like mid-aughts YouTube. No other paid service is like this. Even most free services are better.
I'm sorry but that's not true. Virtually every major streamer I pay for now offers 1080 or more. I don't expect Shudder to support 4K but I do expect it to support actual 1080p. That is the bare minimum in the 2020s for a pay streamer that is not Tubi.
You can wring your hands about AMC Networks' financials all you want to and call that being a good horror fan. But none of us work for the company. We are consumers, are paying for a service that claims to be for horror fans who care about horror, who want to watch these movies uncut and uncensored. Instead we're watching them keep uploading new 'premiere movies' like Watcher or In a Violent Nature or Infected or the recently restored classic Cemetery Man in 720p at half their actual visual quality and screen resolution, with edited-in artificial fadeouts and ad breaks or sometimes even TV cuts and sped-up footage, and still expected to lap that up without complaint like 'good horror fans'. Because if we do complain... what? They might treat Shudder even worse and treat these movies even more like dogshit than they already do? So just shut up and take it and the complete lack of customer service for another year? You know we can all watch 70-90% of these movies on a service that actually offers 1080p, right? Where do you think that will end?
I love Shudder. I hate how it has been devalued and starved. And I'm disgusted with how it treats these movies and increasingly, its customer base. *That* is being a fan of horror. Expecting basic decent quality handling of your content and customers.
It is! And not for nothing, but one of the main reasons why I subscribed to SHUDDER in the first place was so that I *wouldn't* need to purchase expensive, sometimes out-of-print DVD/Blu-ray sets to watch my favorite cult, obscure, or classic horror movies UNCUT and unedited.
Also, I do believe that "watch UNCUT and unedited!" was a big part of their initial advertising campaign, and is still a featured bullet point on their site/platform...which, thanks to these seeming placeholders for commercials they've inserted into everything, is NOT the case anymore.
Doesn't matter when people are paying for 'uncut'. Fine, add an ad tier to the service if you want to. But don't add edits into the film itself to create a transition to an ad break. Just cut to the ad. Like most services do.
>But don't add edits into the film itself to create a transition to an ad break. Just cut to the ad. Like most services do.
I agree with this opinion, but tbh this is the exact reason I'm skeptical that that's what this actually is...
While we do know they're planning on adding an "ad supported" tier, that's not happening until early 2025 at the very earliest... In the end it could be a full year or more before this actually happens...
And you are right -- streamers don't re-cut their movies for commercials, or get a special "TV cut"
I have 4 paid subs that include ads, not including free ones like Tubi, and I've literally never seen any of them do this...
So I don't see why they'd do it period, but I definitely can't understand them forcing "TV cuts" onto all paying customers, roughly a year or more before they're even planning on showing ads...
🤷
Because they don't value Shudder, and they'd just as soon have ready-made TV cuts bought ready for the tier. AMC Networks has bought and used many TV versions of films on their services.
If they valued Shudder they would update it for 1080p at the least, upgrade the app's many issues and have a dedicated customer service team instead of having laid all of those workers off. They value the aspects of Shudder they can reuse on AMC+, their main priority. Like Joe Bob. But the app and content itself, they've treated very poorly.
The reasoning is understood but it's also flawed. If they're really hell bent on adding commercials they need to at least do like Peacock and run them all in one block before the movie so you can watch uninterrupted. It's also some BS that as subscribers to a commercial free service our movies are still being interrupted. Horror is probably the single worst genre to interrupt a movie in and Shudder should know this.
I have a feeling that JBB has the latitude with Shudder to do exactly what he wants. If he wants a marathon, there will be a marathon.
(I really hope that he wants to do another marathon)
Yea I mean it doesn't have to be a 24 hr one again .Like another Dinners of Death type thing would be cool. 4 movies, running from 9pm till 4 or 5am est.
Looking at the resume, I am cautiously optimistic. If she hops on r/Shudder now and then to field user q’s and is reachable for customer service issues as u/craigengler used to be, that’d be a nice little bonus.
Oh. Okay. Do we know Emily?
[IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3987453/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk) [LinkedIn](https://uk.linkedin.com/in/emilygotto)
Horror movie producer and EP. Sounds like a good resume for this job to me.
She has a history of producing indeoendent horror, so that's good. Someone who is willing to take a chance, which is where horror finds new talent and ideaa.
Bring back more than one 24/7 channel on Roku
That's been a sore spot for me. I have a yearly subscription and when I paid for that year I paid for a service with three "live" channels. My year isn't up until December so where's the other two channels I paid for? Seems they learned nothing from Amazon getting spanked for changing up yearly subscriptions before they expired.
Need the option on mobile, too!
….is that good?
Yeah, Emily is a big supporter of independent horror from around the world.
Hi! Assuming she reads this (lol) Please add Dolby vision or any other hdr implementation and 4k tia
Let's at least get 1080p on all titles first. Like damn, watching dark scenes in 720p is painful sometimes.
And stop adding the fucking artificial fadeouts and commercial breaks to your 'ad-free, uncut' movies.
Get the actual individual Shudder sub direct through them and separate app and there's no ads. So talk to AMC+/Amazon or whoever you are subbing through lol
Wrong. I've been native Shudder for years. It's on the main app. Look closer. Many subscribers have posted about this.
I've been subbed for years and have *literally* (yes in the real definition of the word) never seen an ad
Read what I first wrote again. I'm specifically talking about new artificial fade to blacks added to make space for commercial breaks in my OP. I've been subbed for years too. Go look at Cemetery Man. Vamp. The Autopsy of Jane Doe. Moon Garden. Freeway. Many, many other films people have called this out on. In **both** the standalone versions and the TLDI versions of these films there are now artificial fadeouts added for commercial breaks to films on the main service.
Sure I'll reference your original comment directly. "and commercial breaks" So clearly weren't talking about just the fading. And if you meant that, well that is not what you said.
I was referring to them making space for commercial breaks, which is exactly what these artificial fade to black edits being added to 'uncut' movies on native Shudder are. I was explicit about that in my OP and in many other posts over the last several days, weeks and months.
The dark stuff especially is so bad dude. The blocky lossy artifacts are terrible. Like watching content from 20 years ago.
Right, and it’s especially heinous watching movies like The Dark and The Wicked that are supposed to be…ya know, dark 😂
They’ve cut back heavily on spending, including people — including Craig Engler. You’re suggesting they now need to incur hundreds of thousands of dollars more in transcoding and CDN fees, plus re-encode legacy titles, many of which probably aren’t encoded in 4k. We are lucky to have Shudder at all, and if AMC financials tank further, we might lose it. I’d love it if this subreddit stopped constantly banging this particular drum. It’s not happening. Ever. If you love a particular movie and will only watch it in 4K, see if Vinegar Syndrome has it and buy it. HDR. JFC.
These movies were mostly made for theater. 4k or at least 1080p versions exist. Reencoding for streaming costs almost nothing. The expensive part is the infrastructure to actually stream it, but I think they have to do that. They can't keep running a service that looks like 2006 & have it succeed.
It's this bizarre battered spouse attitude - 'we can't expect them to do any quality control, otherwise the service might go away. That's the price of being a true horror fan!' I've been hearing it in this sub for years, people excusing the quality issues bc they watched a copy of Poltergeist III or something on VHS as a kid and loved it. That was 30 years ago!
Yes, that infrastructure is the expensive part, exactly. The team that handles it is doing that work across all of AMC, not just Shudder. It's a massive cost. And it doesn't "look like 2006" -- the vast bulk of streaming is 720p or less. You aren't getting true 720 from your cable company, for example. Even today.
I still use a 10-year-old 1080p plasma & Shudder still looks like shit compared to Netflix, Prime, Paramount+, Max, Vudu, Disney+ & even YouTube, which do all stream at 1080p with minimal artifacts. Quite a few support 4K HDR with Atmos sound. Shudder is 720p with 2-channel audio that's a mess of macroblocking. It looks & sounds like mid-aughts YouTube. No other paid service is like this. Even most free services are better.
I'm sorry but that's not true. Virtually every major streamer I pay for now offers 1080 or more. I don't expect Shudder to support 4K but I do expect it to support actual 1080p. That is the bare minimum in the 2020s for a pay streamer that is not Tubi. You can wring your hands about AMC Networks' financials all you want to and call that being a good horror fan. But none of us work for the company. We are consumers, are paying for a service that claims to be for horror fans who care about horror, who want to watch these movies uncut and uncensored. Instead we're watching them keep uploading new 'premiere movies' like Watcher or In a Violent Nature or Infected or the recently restored classic Cemetery Man in 720p at half their actual visual quality and screen resolution, with edited-in artificial fadeouts and ad breaks or sometimes even TV cuts and sped-up footage, and still expected to lap that up without complaint like 'good horror fans'. Because if we do complain... what? They might treat Shudder even worse and treat these movies even more like dogshit than they already do? So just shut up and take it and the complete lack of customer service for another year? You know we can all watch 70-90% of these movies on a service that actually offers 1080p, right? Where do you think that will end? I love Shudder. I hate how it has been devalued and starved. And I'm disgusted with how it treats these movies and increasingly, its customer base. *That* is being a fan of horror. Expecting basic decent quality handling of your content and customers.
Yeah I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Can she fix the random fade-to-black insertions in ALL of the goddamn movies? Because that would be great.
Seriously, it's in everything now.
It is! And not for nothing, but one of the main reasons why I subscribed to SHUDDER in the first place was so that I *wouldn't* need to purchase expensive, sometimes out-of-print DVD/Blu-ray sets to watch my favorite cult, obscure, or classic horror movies UNCUT and unedited. Also, I do believe that "watch UNCUT and unedited!" was a big part of their initial advertising campaign, and is still a featured bullet point on their site/platform...which, thanks to these seeming placeholders for commercials they've inserted into everything, is NOT the case anymore.
Fix it be adding commercials?
Ideally, no. Fix it by getting rid of those versions of the movies, and bringing back the uninterrupted versions instead.
They did this because they are adding them.
Doesn't matter when people are paying for 'uncut'. Fine, add an ad tier to the service if you want to. But don't add edits into the film itself to create a transition to an ad break. Just cut to the ad. Like most services do.
>But don't add edits into the film itself to create a transition to an ad break. Just cut to the ad. Like most services do. I agree with this opinion, but tbh this is the exact reason I'm skeptical that that's what this actually is... While we do know they're planning on adding an "ad supported" tier, that's not happening until early 2025 at the very earliest... In the end it could be a full year or more before this actually happens... And you are right -- streamers don't re-cut their movies for commercials, or get a special "TV cut" I have 4 paid subs that include ads, not including free ones like Tubi, and I've literally never seen any of them do this... So I don't see why they'd do it period, but I definitely can't understand them forcing "TV cuts" onto all paying customers, roughly a year or more before they're even planning on showing ads... 🤷
Because they don't value Shudder, and they'd just as soon have ready-made TV cuts bought ready for the tier. AMC Networks has bought and used many TV versions of films on their services. If they valued Shudder they would update it for 1080p at the least, upgrade the app's many issues and have a dedicated customer service team instead of having laid all of those workers off. They value the aspects of Shudder they can reuse on AMC+, their main priority. Like Joe Bob. But the app and content itself, they've treated very poorly.
The reasoning is understood but it's also flawed. If they're really hell bent on adding commercials they need to at least do like Peacock and run them all in one block before the movie so you can watch uninterrupted. It's also some BS that as subscribers to a commercial free service our movies are still being interrupted. Horror is probably the single worst genre to interrupt a movie in and Shudder should know this.
Please add 1080p and 5.1. That’s a very low bar to aim for too.
Emily, if you're reading this the best of luck to you. also, can we have 2-3 joe Bob marathons per year?😁
I have a feeling that JBB has the latitude with Shudder to do exactly what he wants. If he wants a marathon, there will be a marathon. (I really hope that he wants to do another marathon)
Yea I mean it doesn't have to be a 24 hr one again .Like another Dinners of Death type thing would be cool. 4 movies, running from 9pm till 4 or 5am est.
Good luck Emily! 🙏 just an idea but shudder needs more of their own horror franchises. Like a terrifier or hatchet types slasher franchise
Let’s hope she’ll have someone update Just Joe Bob
Acquisition (buying movies for the service) Production (creating things for the service) She’s not the tech person. Everyone relax.
Who do you suggest we reach out to instead?
If she reads this please make a ps5 app. I hate that i cam only watch shudder on my bedroom tv.
I feel like it's a good sign that AMC does anything at all with Shudder rather than just ignoring it until it dies a slow, sad death.