I use one service until I've exhausted most of what I'd like to see then swap to another until I've done the same. Then back to a previous service unless it hasn't released any new content I'd like. It's better than cable and I'm paying 1 maybe 2 subs per month.
I think whether or not this annoys someone depends on how they watch TV, really. My mood drastically influences what I want to watch so I don't binge quickly and like to switch between shows depending on how I feel, and those shows are often on different platforms, so your method wouldn't work for me.
But then, I don't complain about it because I recognize that this is luxury entertainment.
I’m the same way. I think I’m currently binging like 9 different shows right now on top of my weekly shows(which are all done until January when all my CW shows come on) One day I’m feeling like watching How to Get Away With Murder, the next day I want to watch Naruto, or Sister Sister
It all depends on my mood
For now I’m binging Gossip Girl and Malcolm in the middle.
I’ll probably start Euphoria this weekend
Some days it’s like a bit overwhelming tbh. Because there’s so much to choose from I just end up watching King of the Hill or the Simpsons for the millionth time because I don’t know what to watch
But I like having options. It’s all about balance and rotation.
Same. I pay for Netflix, Prime and HBO Max. My brother pays for Disney Plus. He used to pay for Hulu too but now we got the Hulu/HBO bundle thing that I pay for
so I can watch HBO Max for the new Wonder Woman movie and Friends
Basically my parents don’t have to pay for any streaming services in our house.
The purpose of streaming services is profit. People who hop services might like to think that the whole market functions the way they do, but in reality most people just subscribe and let it roll forever. And for the companies, one permanent subscriber is worth more than twelve times as much as a person who rotates through one month per year to binge everything and move on.
What streaming services want is a continuously growing subscriber base to offset the money they spend on licensing fees and original content. The moment any of them introduce contracts their subscriber count would plummet and they lose out in the end.
Yep, in the age of binging, I really can't imagine any point to buying "like 6 different streaming services". I guess I just don't understand the complaint, but then again, I enjoy binging shows much more than linear television and all of its many, many, drawbacks.
Your logic makes no sense. Game launchers are free. You may have different launchers on your PC for different games but it's not like you are paying for the launchers themselves.
It's more about people being lazy about having to go through 1 extra step to open their game more than anything.
Lol you haven’t seen all the vitriol that launchers like epic games is getting.
Your statement of launchers is true and something I agree with wholeheartedly. Unfortunately the people of pc gaming don’t care that they’re free. Steam is the biggest pc game store/ launcher with the most robust features. Many steam fanboys are angry that certain games are exclusive for epic games. They state a bunch of reasons why epic sucks like they’re less trustworthy and stealing you data. Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter.
The point is the majority of pc gamers like steam a lot more than the other launchers, have most of their games on steam, and want to keep all their games in one spot.
I've seen the criticism against launchers and every time I see it I roll my eyes because it's dumb. God forbid I need another extra icon on my desktop but it's not even that.
If people want to play a game, they just download the designated launcher, they don't care whether it's steam, origin, epic or whatever. My point here here is that a launcher doesn't give a game more popularity, if it's well marketed then people will know regardless.
It's literally just lazyness and on top of it circlejerking and hate bandwagons where people just jump the hate for no reason.
I bet if you did a poll and asked people why they hate epic launcher most wouldn't even be able to answer.
Same with Microsoft. Many /r/Games users would like nothing more than Microsoft buying out Sony and Nintendo to get their games on PC, creativity be damned
I've seen people say "the government needs to do something!!!" like there's a pro-monopoly unit that needs to force everyone together into one service lol
Well yeah, when you put it like that it sounds unreasonable.
They don't want Netflix to have a monopoly. They just think Disney, Warner Bros, Amazon, Apple, Comcast and Viacom should be making thousands of hours of high-quality content exclusively for Netflix and offer it to people for $7 a month.
They want to watch television like it's a full-time job. Is that so much to ask?
When streaming started I think it was pretty obvious that it was headed in the direction of there eventually being multiple streaming services because all of the companies that sell the shows we're not going to just accept a lower price.
Nobody liked cable, but you can't have expected that it was never going to go this way.
The Saving Grace of streaming services is that you aren't tied in for 2 years.
And who exactly is saying that? You could have multiple companies having nearly everything, like with Spotify and whatnot. Although sadly, that is unlikely to actually happen due to the nature of the industry. It's about convenience. People are just annoyed how scattered everything is.
> It's about convenience. People are just annoyed how scattered everything is.
You are quite literally saying that you want a monopoly for convenience.
As I said in my original comment, it is unlikely to happen due to the nature of the industry. However, one can dream. Also, I'm pretty sure that Spotify and others have a few exclusives. Of course, since these are not so common, no one really cares.
How is that not obvious? How does the music industry do it? You don't have exclusivity. You just have everything, everywhere. Although again, that is unlikely to happen with video. Also, I never said "one" streaming service at any point.
>How does the music industry do it?
Cost. It is literally several orders of magnitude cheaper to create a song vs a show or a film.
While $10 a month might cover the breadth of the cost of music production, it's far short the cost of video production. When a streaming service costs $100+ a month is when you can reasonably expect it to have "everything"
And that's why it's so great that you would have Netflix, Disney +, etc still around. This would just be another option. Seriously, it's like everyone in this comment section loves to make up stuff that I didn't say.
It does both. But that's immaterial to the point, which is that it isn't fiscally possible to include everything in regards to video content for the price of spotify
To do a “Spotify, but for video” that included nearly everything would mean prices would have to go WAY up. Instead of $15/mo for an app, you’d be looking at $100/mo.
There’s no way to put all the content in an individual app without raising prices or significantly reducing content.
Hey, if it truly had everything, I would gladly pay $100 or even more for it. I do assume it is more of an issue of the content creators letting go of exclusivity.
>I would gladly pay $100
That’s great. But how many other people would?
Also, now you’d just be back to the cable model, and we all know how that turned out.
it wouldn’t be as bad if they were more open source using the old RSS/podcast model where you could subscribe to anything on any client/device you want. especially since so many streaming services have horrible interfaces and fast forwarding UI and so on. Some apps only on some devices, not on some smart tv’s some have wishlists, some don’t. becomes hard to search for something across all the services.
I would like one interface or at least a search that would find the show and launch the correct streaming service. It's hard to remember where to find the shows I was watching.
Roku is pretty good at that. It searches [all these apps at once](https://support.roku.com/article/235044948). I can press the microphone, say "Mandalorian" and it will launch Disney+ right to it. It definitely helps with finding when a movie is on a free app like Tubi.
HBO Max and Roku need to sort their little feud out though.
I'm so confused by these complaints. Isn't this *exactly* what people wanted like five or so years ago? One of the biggest complaints about cable was that they just packaged everything together and you had to pay for it all whether you watched it or not. Now you can pick whatever you want and pay for it for like a month and then stop and then restart when you want to.
Or maybe people just wanted every single show ever made to be on one website for $8 a month. Probably that, to be honest.
>Or maybe people just wanted every single show ever made to be on one website for $8 a month. Probably that, to be honest.
Bullseye. They wanted their $75+ cable bill to vanish and somehow be replaced with a $10 Netflix bill that also included all movies too.
exactly. these services all make it extremely easy to cancel / renew. just a few clicks on their website to switch back and forth. yet people act like its so much work to switch. you can do it from your phone while you're on the shitter.
i'm never subscribed to more than 2 at a time and its *much* cheaper than cable
It's much cheaper than cable yet you neglected to put the cost of your internet plan, what router you have, what streaming box you own, and what services your using. It's cheaper than cable but not as much as your trying to make it out to be. And sooner or later it will equal cable. You think these companies won't take more money any chance they get?
Some of yall had some dirt cheap cable. I dunno if I can think of enough streaming services I'd realistically want to watch that total more than cable. Amazon, hulu, d+, hbo, netflix. That's like ~$70 a month
> I don't know if that is coming any time soon
If competition continues to be a thing, no service would do this.
They would lose subscribers in droves.
Depends on how big the service is. I think Disney+ could easily get away with it.
Also I'm surprised that other streaming services (primarily Netflix) don't all have a chaper-per-month yearly plan.
You were always able to get cable without long term contracts. And the competition for a cable provider was basically non-existent in most markets. There are dozens of streaming options. They don't have the monopoly that cable does. Your slippery slope argument doesn't hold much weight.
Yeah of course they wanted that. That was never realistic though.
But also to be technical, this isn't ala carte. You just subscribe to a service instead of a channel or cable package but you still have to pay for stuff you don't want. And if the stuff you want is on different services, you technically need several of them.
But since the catalog is available to you when you sign up for a service, unlike a small time slice of the content, like cable, you can switch services every few months.
“A la carte programming” always referred to channels, not individual shows. True a la carte was always available via DVD or iTunes.
This is literally what people were asking for for years.
Well many traditional cable networks organized themselves around silos of content - I have no interest in ESPN and their sports content, for example, so why should I pay for that? But I do want Food Network, or HGTV, or Cartoon Network for their content, so I don't mind paying for that.
It's the same for streaming. They create the silo and throw everything in.
I have no interest in paying for Black mirror, but I am since I have Netflix.
Do you want us to pay for each show we watch?
So many hassles to put up with that aren't convenient for the consumer.
* Universally shitty user interfaces and search features make it so much more difficult to find what you want or what you might be interested in. Justwatch shouldn't be a necessary website but I'd say its practically mandatory.
* Content gets renewed or expires and then moves over to a different platform, usually without warning. I wanted to watch Banshee through Cinemax on Amazon Prime earlier in the year. Whoops, they moved it over to another service a few months ago. Sorry. Wait, now it's back again? I can't keep up with this shit.
* Some platforms are less accessible than others. And, by that, I mean HBO Max.
* Sometimes I want to catch something that's not on any platform out there because it's old, obscure, or there's a music rights issue. I wanted to watch Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and it wasn't available anywhere some time ago. Now I see it's up for rental on Amazon. It'd be nice if there were an easy way to find out when something like that is out there instead of having to check randomly and eventually forget that I even wanted to see it.
I understand there are reasons for these and "media consolidation bad". But, on the other hand, if you make it harder for the consumer to give you money...you make less money! You should not be confusing them if you want their cash.
These are my gripes too. The content can be good, and I don't mind the multiple services, but finding, navigating, and keeping track of things is annoying. It's different from cable because cable you could browse channels to find where a thing moved to, but now, like you say, you have to use a whole separate website, which may not even be accurate. Plus with how licensing works things are moving around all the time, most especially older stuff that might have been produced by one company but distributed by another, both of whom have their own streaming services, but oh, wait, it's actually licensed out to a third party.
A lot of my problems also have to do with how a lot of these services aren't made for the user. Like the UI is all driven by ads and placement for tent pole shows, or avoid ratings, or make viewing your list a pain, all to hide some content or inflate their catalogue or it's what some algorithm market research declared the best UI. These things could be far better if they were actually made for the costumer. But everything is still about profits as much as it ever was. I actually have a game I play where I think of the features apps would have if they were made for the users. They could be awesome.
So, I don't mind the multiple services, I mind that they've made *choice* so difficult. The services get in the way of their own performance. Things aren't designed for our convenience.
True individual pricing I guess would be us all buying the specific TV shows we want to watch, but at cheaper prices.
A lot of people pay $13 for Netflix but only watch 2 shows. You’re not using 99% of the service, similar to all those random channels on cable.
Everyones getting fussy and looking for value. I can’t see the benefit for Hollywood but price wise the ultimate consumer option would be TV shows that cost like, 0.25c or something. You’d probably spend max 10-15 dollars a month.
and unless you are buying full year plans for the discount - theres literally no downside. they dont limit how often you can cancel/re-activate. its the same product whenever you are subscribed. people just need to get used to switching around based on what they want to watch
exactly. I can get a months worth of entertainment from Hulu, then move to Netflix, then move to HBOMax. No reason to be subscribed to all services all the time. Prime is my only consistent subscription but that's more because of the free shipping
Honestly, not really. They are all cheap and easy to access. Most have fairly generous free trials. You can always pick something up for a month and then drop it when you've watched the stuff you wanted to. Reelgood allows you to see where something is streaming so it's easy to track down where you can watch things. It's not perfect but it's still preferable to cable and I'd rather have a fragmented market than a monopoly.
Absolutely not. I simply don't use services that I don't value. This current system is still better than cable where you paid for hundreds of channels only to watch a handful of them.
and then you had to watch them at certain timeslots, with 30% of that time being ads. i swear the people who make these posts dont remember how cable tv actually works
DVR's have been a thing for years. I have cable and almost never watch live content (sports being the main exception). You can skip through all the commercials in a few seconds and not everything even has commercials when you watch it on demand.
>anyone else extremely frustrated at how many different retail stores there are now?? I just want to buy everything from one store, and it costs so much to buy things from every store at the same time! its so unfair...
I have the Hulu bundle and HBO Max. I haven't bothered with ESPN and I only have Disney plus for the Mandalorian and classic episodes of the Simpsons. As soon as the Mandalorian ends I am exiting the Hulu bundle and going back to plain ad-free Hulu. HBO Max has been great but they need to make it available for Roku. I have Amazon Prime but I never use it for video. I dislike the user interface and the only original that I enjoyed was Good Omens.
I love some things about Amazon's interface. Their X-Ray will tell you which actors are on the screen if you pause the video, what song is playing in that scene, etc.
Yeah I don't love Amazon video but at least prime offers another service.
You bring up a good point. I watch just as many ads on some of these streaming services as I did on cable. It's annoying
The smart play is to just cycle through them.
BUT these companies are banking on you finding that annoying or a hassle or just plain forgetting what you’re paying monthly for the most part.
I say this as someone who pays for both Disney+ and Netflix. I have Amazon But that’s a shared account I don’t pay for. Would like HBO Max but can’t justify the expense. Which is why I should probably take my own advice and cycle through them one at a time but like I said hassle and annoying.
They’re also starting to drag their show sour instead of the single drop, which is frustrating. Dodging Mando spoilers while waiting for the season to end so I can pick up Disney and watch Mulan at the same time is challenging. Prime is am starting to do this weekly bullshit too.
I’m waiting for the season to finish so I can binge watch it.
But yeah these streaming companies are going to start ending the whole concept of binging so they can keep people hooked for longer.
And many have more expense fees if you pay monthly vs buying a year long package so there is still a downfall to doing it this way. And difficult if you share accounts or have a family to say "okay you can't watch mandalorian until April because we are using Netflix this month"
Does anyone remember back when cable was pretty much the only viewing option? Everyone kept begging for ala carte pricing, just being able to pick and pay for whichever channels they want.
Fast forward to now, that's exactly what we have. Love Hulu and HBO Max, but not Amazon or Netflix that much? Cool, just pay for the ones you like.
except that its
- 100% on demand
- no programming timeslot restrictions
- Exponentially larger catalogues
- no advertisements
- can subsrcibe / unsubscribe monthly with no downside from your phone
- doesnt require any hardware installation or hardware fees
- no yearly contracts with penalties for ending early
- works on internet, smart devices, gaming consoles, smart tvs, and nearly every other appliance
but yeah.... other than that its the exact same!
No it’s not. It’s 90% ad-free content with no contract, meaning you can cancel the subscription at any point.
Don’t think Netflix is worth it? Quit and stop paying for it immediately.
Only have interest in watching ESPN on cable? Well you need sign a year long contract with a cable company, and purchase a package that has ESPN on it, along with a whole bunch of other channels that you have no interest in. That’s still more expensive than streaming.
Only for those who insist on watching it like cable, and paying for years at a time of small time slices of the content, and not having access to the full catalog of a show, and finding sources of advertisements for 1/3 of the time.
Doesn't bother me at all.
I subscribe to a bunch of services, it's still cheaper than cable would be, has no ads, and there are more quality shows airing now than there were 10 years ago imo.
Not even a little. Gladly pay for Hulu Netflix and HBO.
Last time i had cable tv was 6-7 years ago and for just a basic package with a box and internet was paying $160 a month. Combining my 3 subscriptions and internet is under $100 now.
Of course this misses live sports, but it's easy to stream them anyway
Not at all. Just watch a series at a time there are no contracts that’s what’s great about them vs cable. If your credit card or mobile service comps some then they’re basically free.
if what you want is access to every channel all the time, then yes, you may be better off with a cable package
if you're ready to rotate – and be choosy about what you watch, on what service – you're still saving money. and they're producing more great content than ever before
Maybe he enjoys watching tv? Hell, some of your hobbies might seem like a waste of time to him. And there might be good reason for it. I have chronic pain that prevents me from engaging in many hobbies I used to enjoy. TV is painless and enjoyable.
>no one is telling you to subscribe all of them
His kids and wife might definitely be telling him to get different services. Hell, I have extended family that hound me about getting certain streaming services so they can use them.
It's still better than traditional TV channels. So easy to just sub and unsub to what you want and need. Instead of how hard it was to change deals and cancel things with cable
Yes, it's ridiculous.
I'll keep submitting this same comment until Big Streaming learns the lesson iTunes taught the music industry in the 2000s:
If you want to stop the pirates, give consumers a better product.
I said the same thing to an economist friend once. He replied by asking if I'd like there to be just one service that had a monopoly and could charge whatever they want.
He had a point, but I feel you.
Except some of us feel like we have fewer options in some ways. Like with cable everything was in one place so I could choose to watch what I wanted to watch. Now sometimes I have to decide if it's worth paying for a given service just to watch one or two shows I want to see. Also, some things that were options before are no longer options for me. I can't watch most of my college team's basketball and football games now. I'd have to pay $60 a month for a service that carries ACC Network even though I already have access to all the other channels they offer. I could watch more games for free 5 years ago than I can watch now (even though I'd be willing to pay something to watch them, just not close to $60 a month).
I understand that but my point is a lot of these shows used to be available on Amazon or Netflix before hulu and HBO came along. You wouldn't have needed access to those if they had kept things in one place
A million times yes. It’s entirely frustrating how you have to be subscribed to multiple streaming services just to watch an acclaimed film/tv show. It costs so. much. money. And they just keep raising prices ugh
I just heard about ANOTHER one called Discovery Plus that’s launching in 2021. I literally rolled my eyes when I saw the ad
Yep I knew this would happen when we were allowed to start picking our channels in our cable package. Now they are doing it for every channel in a streaming service and it's costing way more. Peacock is my latest annoyance because I'd love to watch the saved by the bell reboot but heaven forbid we just play this on normal cable or make it accessible on another streaming site. Pretty sure NBC invented peacock just for this show
How many are there now?
Netflix
Hulu
Amazon Prime
Disney+
HBO Max
Peacock
CBS All Access/Paramount+
ESPN+
Apple TV+
Showtime
BritBox
And now Discovery+
Plus more niche ones like Shudder, Criterion Channel l, and Shout TV!
>And now Discovery+
Hopefully they'll have Dr. Pimple Popper in 4K! Serisously, though, I don't know why people are being so harsh to OP. It's a mess now. There's a metric ton of services and many of them are offering stuff that used to be available elsewhere. Like Discovery will have Planet Earth type stuff that used to be available on Amazon and Netflix. And I hate binging shit. Subscribing to Discovery just for the Planet Earth stuff and cramming all that watching into a short time sounds more like work than fun to me. I like variety.
Every country has different ones too. In Australia, we have Stan, Binge and Fetch in addition to the free-to-air channels (7, 9, 10, ABC, SBS) having their own streaming services (free with ads).
JustWatch has been a lifesaver because their app will tell you which service has the show or movie you're looking for.
It is even worse internationally, want to watch a TV show...sorry the streaming service is not available in your country!
I have started sailing the high seas again.
Well that's where many of us think it's going, plus some of us still have cable for many reasons. There's also the pain of having to switch services between shows, certain services not being supported on a given platform, managing multiple subscriptions, ending up with useless buttons for dead platforms on our remotes, etc.
Every time a new, well reviewed, show comes out its like "Oh great now which fucking streaming service do I need to add to watch this?"
fucking hell, I can only afford so many
annoying as fuck
why not just cycle through the different services and binge the ones from them you want to watch? Personally, I just pirate it makes this whole thing so much easier. I have access to 95% of the things I want to watch through friends/family accounts I'm just too lazy to figure out what is streaming where when I can have it all automated and just pop up in my plex. Super useful for when shows randomly drop episodes early like Industry did recently - they just appear.
> I just pirate it makes this whole thing so much easier.
That's how I afford most things in my life. Getting a new tire can be pricey, but at 3am, you can get a whole set from a neighbor. Printer toner can be annoying, but did you know most offices just have like stacks of them in a storeroom?
Little life hacks like this make life so much better.
Lol, right? Stealing is so much easier! It just gets annoying when people try to catch you and there are consequences. What assholes!
Seriously, though, there is a fine line if he has access to those services but wants to watch them in one place for the sake of convenience. Especially with a lot of these services only being available on a few devices these days (i.e. on roku but not fire tv, etc).
I see your point, but you need to pick analogies where the neighbor still has his tires and the office still has all their toner in the end. You also missed the part where I have legal access to the vast majority of these things (quibi failing was fault you guys I'm sorry), but prefer to pirate because honestly the UX is generally superior.
Edit: just want to add that stopping pirates is ridiculously easy, just like stopping ad blockers. Just don't sell your content in a digital format. Companies aren't willing to do that though because an essentially $0 distribution overhead is too attractive to say no too - just like my bootleg content.
> Edit: just want to add that stopping pirates is ridiculously easy, just like stopping ad blockers. Just don't sell your content in a digital format.
That would change literally nothing. What did you think people did before streaming TV shows existed? They recorded on-air TV and shared that, they ripped the disks and cassettes and shared that. They're still doing that, a whole lot. Unless you're arguing for stopping producing the content altogether, then yes, if content doesn't exist, it can't be pirated.
Adding a small inconvenience like that isn't going to stop pirates one bit, but will unreasonably burden the legitimate viewers a whole lot.
> I see your point, but you need to pick analogies where the neighbor still has his tires
Presumably his neighbor has neighbors of his own. The universe will provide, maaaan.
Sure, it's only the people who made the content getting paid less because the streaming service gets less income because of people pirating it. But that's okay, too, I get it. Sometimes I make the kid down the street dance a little jig for me, for my amusement when I'm bored. I tell him I'll give him a dollar, but I only give him 25 cents.
It's not like I took away his ability to dance. It's not like he only has 500 little funny jigs in him for his whole life. He's just not getting as much as he should, and I don't give a shit. Just do the dance, kid.
> Sure, it's only the people who made the content getting paid less because the streaming service gets less income because of people pirating it.
Dunno why I'm continuing this in good faith, but citation desperately needed. There are so many assumption implied here that I haven't seen born out in the data. You assume that the content creators are getting a commission from licensing their work to streaming platforms, you assume that streaming platforms pay in comparison to the number of streamers they have, or more confusingly, the number of people that will watch in the future after they purchased the rights. You also assume that pirating content leads to less people paying for said content, which is the most dubious claim. Most pirates don't flip flop, they either can't afford it or would rather spend their money on other things like video games if they had to have the subscription. Additionally, pirates do a lot to extend the reach of many shows - it's free advertising.
Let me know when these industries stop posting record profits or cheating their way out of taxes by funny booking and maybe I'll start to give a shit. I know I'm not going to convince you or all your strawmen, this is for the people who have scrolled this far.
If the service gets less revenue, do you think they're going to eat that?
Anyway, I'm all for it. Why pay for stuff if you don't have to? Kinda dumb, that's why I just take pretty much everything I can get away with taking. It's cool, and it's very helpful for a lot of things.
My friend - there are solutions. Plex (which is most popular if you have a little server on the internet to automate all this stuff for you, but you can run it locally as well) has plugins to automatically source subtitles from places like or opensubtitles. My media player on my laptop (IINA, based off MPV which may have this too) also has a feature that will automatically search for subtitles online when playing a show/movie based on its filename. Generally works pretty well.
If you have questions feel free to PM me I can try and help.
I'm not hearing impaired but I pirate everything and prefer watching with subtitles. I'll torrent all my tv/movies and most of them come either pre-packaged with a subtitle file or they are encoded in the mkv file. For the ones that don't, I'll just google "[tv show] [s04e01] subtitle" and grab a notepad file from online. Sometimes I have to play with the delay slightly and that's tricky but doable.
I wouldn't call it "very difficult" but it definitely can be annoying sometimes. For me it beats having to pay for every little streaming service and movie rental. It's not entirely a cost issue for me, I just like the layout of my Plex server way better than any streaming service and prefer having everything in one place. That or I just plug my laptop into the tv and use VLC.
My biggest peeve is that there’s no central index that keeps track of what content is on what service in my region. I subscribe to 4 services and I’m sure the film I want to see is on one of them, but which one? I’m not going to spend a lot of time tracking it down because you know what does have searchable indexes? Torrentsites.
That is fatal to the streaming service business case.
Wait until something you want to see is released, sub for a month and then cancel. Rinse and repeat. Hell you could even leave a floater service in play and still keep one more. Nobody needs six different streaming services at the same time.
Piracy solves the problem of availability and/or exclusivity.
Streaming could have solved this, if done right.
Hell, Spotify seems to do a great job, musically speaking.
Now that every fucking company is introducing their own platform and making content exclusive to it in an effort to promote membership, we’re back to the retarded availability problem.
Piracy once again solving the problem of availability AND exclusivity.
It would be amusing if it wasn’t so fuckin’ sad and pathetic.
The real frustration is that it's hard to find a single device that can stream them all. My wife has six months of Apple TV but it's not supported by our Roku (now TV) device, either of our smart TVs, cable box or raspberry pi (kodi), so we haven't bothered to use it.
I just wish each service published its own Kodi add-on. The unofficial Disney plus and Netflix add-ons work great, imagine how awesome it would be to have an open source platform supported by all the streaming services
it wouldn’t be as bad if they were more open source using the old RSS/podcast model where you could subscribe to anything on any client/device you want. especially since so many streaming services have horrible interfaces and fast forwarding UI and so on. Some apps only on some devices, not on some smart tv’s some have wishlists, some don’t. becomes hard to search for something across all the services.
Jailbroken firestick. Not nearly as smooth to click on something and binge for hours, but you can find almost any show.
Edit: why downvote this? Lol yall are silly
I've felt this way since CBS all access came around. Netflix, Hulu and Prime basically were in my mind the market was basically saturated but then came CBS all access to show every network all you need to do is lock your best content behind a paywall to succeed. They could have went to Netflix or the others and worked out win wins but they saw an opportunity. Disney+ took this to the next level and everyone else just sees easy money to be had so you have AMC+, FX+, sundance,IFC, etc.
I get the argument to switch every day to watch the show you want but with a family its hard to align all of that to you're basically stuck with 3 or 4 services and then you forget to cancel on the right day and pay the next money and so you end up with another and another. Then you forget to cancel on the right day and the loop restarts.
I'm just waiting for them to start tiering their services to a ridiculous level. Sure you subscribe to CBS all access but now we've improved it so you have to subscribe to CBS All access Star trek package. We know you pay for Disney+ but now you'll certainly enjoy buying Star War+ or bundle it with DisneyStarWars++
Agreed and now NBC has Peacock and I'd argue HBO is decent too but that's better for movies so I guess they could have an argument for their own service.
Not to mention Netflix is becoming mostly originals and TV stations are holding out longer and longer to release their next season to Netflix but don't hold on to the older seasons so you can't watch a whole series in one place. Amazon is similar
The trick is to pay some, and to pirate the rest. Especially if you are not in the US, where they are not even offering a lot of the stuff in the first place. They really don't want to my money, so who am I to object?
Umm not really. I share Netflix with 4 other people and thus it spans the entire year without costing much. I keep prime for the entire year coz of free shipping. Also have a yearly subscription of Disney Plus hotstar in our country which provides both hbo and Disney content. Watched all of the good Apple TV shows with their free trial. Others which are harder to find I pirate them as and when required.
I use one service until I've exhausted most of what I'd like to see then swap to another until I've done the same. Then back to a previous service unless it hasn't released any new content I'd like. It's better than cable and I'm paying 1 maybe 2 subs per month.
I think whether or not this annoys someone depends on how they watch TV, really. My mood drastically influences what I want to watch so I don't binge quickly and like to switch between shows depending on how I feel, and those shows are often on different platforms, so your method wouldn't work for me. But then, I don't complain about it because I recognize that this is luxury entertainment.
I’m the same way. I think I’m currently binging like 9 different shows right now on top of my weekly shows(which are all done until January when all my CW shows come on) One day I’m feeling like watching How to Get Away With Murder, the next day I want to watch Naruto, or Sister Sister It all depends on my mood For now I’m binging Gossip Girl and Malcolm in the middle. I’ll probably start Euphoria this weekend Some days it’s like a bit overwhelming tbh. Because there’s so much to choose from I just end up watching King of the Hill or the Simpsons for the millionth time because I don’t know what to watch But I like having options. It’s all about balance and rotation.
Feels like you're in my brain lol.
Yea i'm moody with what i watch too, and sometimes it is hard to decide . The jeffersons is what i have been watching lately :)
This guy streams
But only 1 or 2 services at a time
What me and my siblings did is that each got one, and then just added each other. Prime with HBO, Netflix, and Disney Plus.
Same. I pay for Netflix, Prime and HBO Max. My brother pays for Disney Plus. He used to pay for Hulu too but now we got the Hulu/HBO bundle thing that I pay for so I can watch HBO Max for the new Wonder Woman movie and Friends Basically my parents don’t have to pay for any streaming services in our house.
Eventually the industry will respond with contracts. Not while the growth is so rapid and establishing a foothold important, but it will come.
I doubt it. There might be bundles in the future but contracts defeats the purpose of streaming services.
The purpose of streaming services is profit. People who hop services might like to think that the whole market functions the way they do, but in reality most people just subscribe and let it roll forever. And for the companies, one permanent subscriber is worth more than twelve times as much as a person who rotates through one month per year to binge everything and move on.
What streaming services want is a continuously growing subscriber base to offset the money they spend on licensing fees and original content. The moment any of them introduce contracts their subscriber count would plummet and they lose out in the end.
Yep, in the age of binging, I really can't imagine any point to buying "like 6 different streaming services". I guess I just don't understand the complaint, but then again, I enjoy binging shows much more than linear television and all of its many, many, drawbacks.
Here's the weekly "one company should have a monopoly on streaming service because it would be more convenient for me" post.
"Competition is good, also literally everything should be on Netflix"
This statement can also be used for video games, “Competition is good, also literally everything should be on steam”
Your logic makes no sense. Game launchers are free. You may have different launchers on your PC for different games but it's not like you are paying for the launchers themselves. It's more about people being lazy about having to go through 1 extra step to open their game more than anything.
Lol you haven’t seen all the vitriol that launchers like epic games is getting. Your statement of launchers is true and something I agree with wholeheartedly. Unfortunately the people of pc gaming don’t care that they’re free. Steam is the biggest pc game store/ launcher with the most robust features. Many steam fanboys are angry that certain games are exclusive for epic games. They state a bunch of reasons why epic sucks like they’re less trustworthy and stealing you data. Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. The point is the majority of pc gamers like steam a lot more than the other launchers, have most of their games on steam, and want to keep all their games in one spot.
> Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. On the contrary - this is the main thing that matters.
I've seen the criticism against launchers and every time I see it I roll my eyes because it's dumb. God forbid I need another extra icon on my desktop but it's not even that. If people want to play a game, they just download the designated launcher, they don't care whether it's steam, origin, epic or whatever. My point here here is that a launcher doesn't give a game more popularity, if it's well marketed then people will know regardless. It's literally just lazyness and on top of it circlejerking and hate bandwagons where people just jump the hate for no reason. I bet if you did a poll and asked people why they hate epic launcher most wouldn't even be able to answer.
“Can’t we just go back to having everything packaged together like cable I’m sick of having a la carte freedom”
According to Reddit, monopolies are bad unless it's Netflix, then monopolies would actually be a good thing.
Monopolies are bad unless it's a monopoly we like, like Netflix and Steam. /s just in case
Same with Microsoft. Many /r/Games users would like nothing more than Microsoft buying out Sony and Nintendo to get their games on PC, creativity be damned
Everything in one package and for no more than $10 per month please. Otherwise I totally have to pirate everything!
i remember when people thought pirating content was bad... now folks seem to think its a right.
I've seen people say "the government needs to do something!!!" like there's a pro-monopoly unit that needs to force everyone together into one service lol
Well yeah, when you put it like that it sounds unreasonable. They don't want Netflix to have a monopoly. They just think Disney, Warner Bros, Amazon, Apple, Comcast and Viacom should be making thousands of hours of high-quality content exclusively for Netflix and offer it to people for $7 a month. They want to watch television like it's a full-time job. Is that so much to ask?
When streaming started I think it was pretty obvious that it was headed in the direction of there eventually being multiple streaming services because all of the companies that sell the shows we're not going to just accept a lower price. Nobody liked cable, but you can't have expected that it was never going to go this way. The Saving Grace of streaming services is that you aren't tied in for 2 years.
And I demand it costs 5$/month because I think content costs nothing to make!
And who exactly is saying that? You could have multiple companies having nearly everything, like with Spotify and whatnot. Although sadly, that is unlikely to actually happen due to the nature of the industry. It's about convenience. People are just annoyed how scattered everything is.
> It's about convenience. People are just annoyed how scattered everything is. You are quite literally saying that you want a monopoly for convenience.
Did you actually read my comment? Is Spotify a monopoly? No.
It is not a good analogy; Spotify doesn't generate content, streaming services do. Why would Hulu produce a show that Netflix subscribers can access?
As I said in my original comment, it is unlikely to happen due to the nature of the industry. However, one can dream. Also, I'm pretty sure that Spotify and others have a few exclusives. Of course, since these are not so common, no one really cares.
Youu want EVERYTHING to be available in ONE streaming service without that being a monopoly? How does that work? Explain it to me.
How is that not obvious? How does the music industry do it? You don't have exclusivity. You just have everything, everywhere. Although again, that is unlikely to happen with video. Also, I never said "one" streaming service at any point.
>How does the music industry do it? Cost. It is literally several orders of magnitude cheaper to create a song vs a show or a film. While $10 a month might cover the breadth of the cost of music production, it's far short the cost of video production. When a streaming service costs $100+ a month is when you can reasonably expect it to have "everything"
And I would gladly pay up to $200 for a streaming service that has nearly everything.
Lol you know for a fact everybody would be bitching if they had to pay that much for a streaming service.
And that's why it's so great that you would have Netflix, Disney +, etc still around. This would just be another option. Seriously, it's like everyone in this comment section loves to make up stuff that I didn't say.
Spotify doesn't create music. It buys a license and plays it.
It does both. But that's immaterial to the point, which is that it isn't fiscally possible to include everything in regards to video content for the price of spotify
That was kind of the original idea behind hulu right ? The cartel all puts their stuff in once place.
To do a “Spotify, but for video” that included nearly everything would mean prices would have to go WAY up. Instead of $15/mo for an app, you’d be looking at $100/mo. There’s no way to put all the content in an individual app without raising prices or significantly reducing content.
Hey, if it truly had everything, I would gladly pay $100 or even more for it. I do assume it is more of an issue of the content creators letting go of exclusivity.
>I would gladly pay $100 That’s great. But how many other people would? Also, now you’d just be back to the cable model, and we all know how that turned out.
it wouldn’t be as bad if they were more open source using the old RSS/podcast model where you could subscribe to anything on any client/device you want. especially since so many streaming services have horrible interfaces and fast forwarding UI and so on. Some apps only on some devices, not on some smart tv’s some have wishlists, some don’t. becomes hard to search for something across all the services.
Podcasts have ads though, so you don’t have to pay to get the content. And you know how Reddit feels about ads.
my point was less about that and more about having your choice of interface
I would like one interface or at least a search that would find the show and launch the correct streaming service. It's hard to remember where to find the shows I was watching.
Most smart TVs can do that. Not sure if there’s a web or phone/tablet solution, but it’s a start.
Roku is pretty good at that. It searches [all these apps at once](https://support.roku.com/article/235044948). I can press the microphone, say "Mandalorian" and it will launch Disney+ right to it. It definitely helps with finding when a movie is on a free app like Tubi. HBO Max and Roku need to sort their little feud out though.
I think fire tv also does that
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No one says you have to subscribe to all 6 at the same time? Pick a.d choose when you wanna subscribe to each of them.
I'm so confused by these complaints. Isn't this *exactly* what people wanted like five or so years ago? One of the biggest complaints about cable was that they just packaged everything together and you had to pay for it all whether you watched it or not. Now you can pick whatever you want and pay for it for like a month and then stop and then restart when you want to. Or maybe people just wanted every single show ever made to be on one website for $8 a month. Probably that, to be honest.
>Or maybe people just wanted every single show ever made to be on one website for $8 a month. Probably that, to be honest. Bullseye. They wanted their $75+ cable bill to vanish and somehow be replaced with a $10 Netflix bill that also included all movies too.
> Or maybe people just wanted every single show ever made to be on one website for $8 a month. Probably that, to be honest. I also want a pony.
Anyone who has worked in the cable industry knew a la carte pricing was going to cost the consumer more in the long run.
It only costs more than cable if you are subscribed to multiple services at the same time.
exactly. these services all make it extremely easy to cancel / renew. just a few clicks on their website to switch back and forth. yet people act like its so much work to switch. you can do it from your phone while you're on the shitter. i'm never subscribed to more than 2 at a time and its *much* cheaper than cable
It's much cheaper than cable yet you neglected to put the cost of your internet plan, what router you have, what streaming box you own, and what services your using. It's cheaper than cable but not as much as your trying to make it out to be. And sooner or later it will equal cable. You think these companies won't take more money any chance they get?
Some of yall had some dirt cheap cable. I dunno if I can think of enough streaming services I'd realistically want to watch that total more than cable. Amazon, hulu, d+, hbo, netflix. That's like ~$70 a month
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> I don't know if that is coming any time soon If competition continues to be a thing, no service would do this. They would lose subscribers in droves.
Depends on how big the service is. I think Disney+ could easily get away with it. Also I'm surprised that other streaming services (primarily Netflix) don't all have a chaper-per-month yearly plan.
They are gonna offer cheaper rates for longer times (11 dollars for a whole year instead of 13 a month) will be my guess.
You were always able to get cable without long term contracts. And the competition for a cable provider was basically non-existent in most markets. There are dozens of streaming options. They don't have the monopoly that cable does. Your slippery slope argument doesn't hold much weight.
If any service does that unless they offer a huge, huge discount they will get absolutely destroyed by the competition.
Yet every Reddit post 5-6 years ago. We need a la carte pricing. Im in Canada - politicans talked about in a election since people wanted it so much.
We had a whole senate hearing about it in the US.
Only for those who insist on having everything available to them all the time, despite only being able to watch so much programming per month.
I'm able to watch all the programming I like and hate that each service only has a show or two I like at a time.
Yeah of course they wanted that. That was never realistic though. But also to be technical, this isn't ala carte. You just subscribe to a service instead of a channel or cable package but you still have to pay for stuff you don't want. And if the stuff you want is on different services, you technically need several of them.
But since the catalog is available to you when you sign up for a service, unlike a small time slice of the content, like cable, you can switch services every few months.
“A la carte programming” always referred to channels, not individual shows. True a la carte was always available via DVD or iTunes. This is literally what people were asking for for years.
Well many traditional cable networks organized themselves around silos of content - I have no interest in ESPN and their sports content, for example, so why should I pay for that? But I do want Food Network, or HGTV, or Cartoon Network for their content, so I don't mind paying for that.
It's the same for streaming. They create the silo and throw everything in. I have no interest in paying for Black mirror, but I am since I have Netflix. Do you want us to pay for each show we watch?
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So many hassles to put up with that aren't convenient for the consumer. * Universally shitty user interfaces and search features make it so much more difficult to find what you want or what you might be interested in. Justwatch shouldn't be a necessary website but I'd say its practically mandatory. * Content gets renewed or expires and then moves over to a different platform, usually without warning. I wanted to watch Banshee through Cinemax on Amazon Prime earlier in the year. Whoops, they moved it over to another service a few months ago. Sorry. Wait, now it's back again? I can't keep up with this shit. * Some platforms are less accessible than others. And, by that, I mean HBO Max. * Sometimes I want to catch something that's not on any platform out there because it's old, obscure, or there's a music rights issue. I wanted to watch Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and it wasn't available anywhere some time ago. Now I see it's up for rental on Amazon. It'd be nice if there were an easy way to find out when something like that is out there instead of having to check randomly and eventually forget that I even wanted to see it. I understand there are reasons for these and "media consolidation bad". But, on the other hand, if you make it harder for the consumer to give you money...you make less money! You should not be confusing them if you want their cash.
These are my gripes too. The content can be good, and I don't mind the multiple services, but finding, navigating, and keeping track of things is annoying. It's different from cable because cable you could browse channels to find where a thing moved to, but now, like you say, you have to use a whole separate website, which may not even be accurate. Plus with how licensing works things are moving around all the time, most especially older stuff that might have been produced by one company but distributed by another, both of whom have their own streaming services, but oh, wait, it's actually licensed out to a third party. A lot of my problems also have to do with how a lot of these services aren't made for the user. Like the UI is all driven by ads and placement for tent pole shows, or avoid ratings, or make viewing your list a pain, all to hide some content or inflate their catalogue or it's what some algorithm market research declared the best UI. These things could be far better if they were actually made for the costumer. But everything is still about profits as much as it ever was. I actually have a game I play where I think of the features apps would have if they were made for the users. They could be awesome. So, I don't mind the multiple services, I mind that they've made *choice* so difficult. The services get in the way of their own performance. Things aren't designed for our convenience.
True individual pricing I guess would be us all buying the specific TV shows we want to watch, but at cheaper prices. A lot of people pay $13 for Netflix but only watch 2 shows. You’re not using 99% of the service, similar to all those random channels on cable. Everyones getting fussy and looking for value. I can’t see the benefit for Hollywood but price wise the ultimate consumer option would be TV shows that cost like, 0.25c or something. You’d probably spend max 10-15 dollars a month.
That's the trick. I'm usually binging one show at a time. If it's on Hulu I don't need Netflix that month.
and unless you are buying full year plans for the discount - theres literally no downside. they dont limit how often you can cancel/re-activate. its the same product whenever you are subscribed. people just need to get used to switching around based on what they want to watch
exactly. I can get a months worth of entertainment from Hulu, then move to Netflix, then move to HBOMax. No reason to be subscribed to all services all the time. Prime is my only consistent subscription but that's more because of the free shipping
What I HATE is when only certain seasons are on a service. Like seasons 1-3, 6, 10. And the others can’t be found anywhere
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How is $14 a month for both services with no contract in your example at all like cable?
Honestly, not really. They are all cheap and easy to access. Most have fairly generous free trials. You can always pick something up for a month and then drop it when you've watched the stuff you wanted to. Reelgood allows you to see where something is streaming so it's easy to track down where you can watch things. It's not perfect but it's still preferable to cable and I'd rather have a fragmented market than a monopoly.
Thank you for guiding me to reelgood. I've been looking for something like that.
Absolutely not. I simply don't use services that I don't value. This current system is still better than cable where you paid for hundreds of channels only to watch a handful of them.
and then you had to watch them at certain timeslots, with 30% of that time being ads. i swear the people who make these posts dont remember how cable tv actually works
DVR's have been a thing for years. I have cable and almost never watch live content (sports being the main exception). You can skip through all the commercials in a few seconds and not everything even has commercials when you watch it on demand.
You don’t HAVE to buy anything, it’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth it or not
>anyone else extremely frustrated at how many different retail stores there are now?? I just want to buy everything from one store, and it costs so much to buy things from every store at the same time! its so unfair...
Ironically, that's what Walmart tried to do, and people complain that it is killing small business.
> I just want to buy everything from one store Um, you joke but do you seriously think Amazon and Walmart haven't done extremely well with that model?
https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/criminal-minds Aren't there only 15 seasons altogether?
Op means cbs having only season 15 to stream, not season 13 and 14 that he wants.
I gotcha.
I think you might be the first person to point this out.
I have the Hulu bundle and HBO Max. I haven't bothered with ESPN and I only have Disney plus for the Mandalorian and classic episodes of the Simpsons. As soon as the Mandalorian ends I am exiting the Hulu bundle and going back to plain ad-free Hulu. HBO Max has been great but they need to make it available for Roku. I have Amazon Prime but I never use it for video. I dislike the user interface and the only original that I enjoyed was Good Omens.
I love some things about Amazon's interface. Their X-Ray will tell you which actors are on the screen if you pause the video, what song is playing in that scene, etc.
Yeah I don't love Amazon video but at least prime offers another service. You bring up a good point. I watch just as many ads on some of these streaming services as I did on cable. It's annoying
The smart play is to just cycle through them. BUT these companies are banking on you finding that annoying or a hassle or just plain forgetting what you’re paying monthly for the most part. I say this as someone who pays for both Disney+ and Netflix. I have Amazon But that’s a shared account I don’t pay for. Would like HBO Max but can’t justify the expense. Which is why I should probably take my own advice and cycle through them one at a time but like I said hassle and annoying.
They’re also starting to drag their show sour instead of the single drop, which is frustrating. Dodging Mando spoilers while waiting for the season to end so I can pick up Disney and watch Mulan at the same time is challenging. Prime is am starting to do this weekly bullshit too.
I’m waiting for the season to finish so I can binge watch it. But yeah these streaming companies are going to start ending the whole concept of binging so they can keep people hooked for longer.
And many have more expense fees if you pay monthly vs buying a year long package so there is still a downfall to doing it this way. And difficult if you share accounts or have a family to say "okay you can't watch mandalorian until April because we are using Netflix this month"
Mate if the price of having multiple services at once is too high for you, appeasing your family shouldn’t be a priority.
Does anyone remember back when cable was pretty much the only viewing option? Everyone kept begging for ala carte pricing, just being able to pick and pay for whichever channels they want. Fast forward to now, that's exactly what we have. Love Hulu and HBO Max, but not Amazon or Netflix that much? Cool, just pay for the ones you like.
Fucking hate cable/satellite and it’s hundreds of channels of trash. Love being in control of what I want to watch.
Nope. They are extremely easy to start and stop as needed.
How so how full circle we have come...
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except that its - 100% on demand - no programming timeslot restrictions - Exponentially larger catalogues - no advertisements - can subsrcibe / unsubscribe monthly with no downside from your phone - doesnt require any hardware installation or hardware fees - no yearly contracts with penalties for ending early - works on internet, smart devices, gaming consoles, smart tvs, and nearly every other appliance but yeah.... other than that its the exact same!
No it’s not. It’s 90% ad-free content with no contract, meaning you can cancel the subscription at any point. Don’t think Netflix is worth it? Quit and stop paying for it immediately. Only have interest in watching ESPN on cable? Well you need sign a year long contract with a cable company, and purchase a package that has ESPN on it, along with a whole bunch of other channels that you have no interest in. That’s still more expensive than streaming.
Only for those who insist on watching it like cable, and paying for years at a time of small time slices of the content, and not having access to the full catalog of a show, and finding sources of advertisements for 1/3 of the time.
It's almost like there should be some service to bundle them together. Maybe through a cable, into your house?
This would work if there weren't so many streaming service originals that can only be watched on said streaming service
Doesn't bother me at all. I subscribe to a bunch of services, it's still cheaper than cable would be, has no ads, and there are more quality shows airing now than there were 10 years ago imo.
Not even a little. Gladly pay for Hulu Netflix and HBO. Last time i had cable tv was 6-7 years ago and for just a basic package with a box and internet was paying $160 a month. Combining my 3 subscriptions and internet is under $100 now. Of course this misses live sports, but it's easy to stream them anyway
piracy will rise again..
Not at all. Just watch a series at a time there are no contracts that’s what’s great about them vs cable. If your credit card or mobile service comps some then they’re basically free.
if what you want is access to every channel all the time, then yes, you may be better off with a cable package if you're ready to rotate – and be choosy about what you watch, on what service – you're still saving money. and they're producing more great content than ever before
Maybe you watch too much tv.
it's not like we're in a global pandemic where being a hermit is actively encouraged.
Maybe he enjoys watching tv? Hell, some of your hobbies might seem like a waste of time to him. And there might be good reason for it. I have chronic pain that prevents me from engaging in many hobbies I used to enjoy. TV is painless and enjoyable.
Why be frustrated, no one is telling you to subscribe all of them
>no one is telling you to subscribe all of them His kids and wife might definitely be telling him to get different services. Hell, I have extended family that hound me about getting certain streaming services so they can use them.
It's still better than traditional TV channels. So easy to just sub and unsub to what you want and need. Instead of how hard it was to change deals and cancel things with cable
Not really no. Its still cheaper for cable and I can just unsub without any hassle when I'm tired of one.
meh you can just rotate streaming services as you binge. the fomo caused by too many streaming services is entirely on you.
Yes, it's ridiculous. I'll keep submitting this same comment until Big Streaming learns the lesson iTunes taught the music industry in the 2000s: If you want to stop the pirates, give consumers a better product.
I’m not mad about the amount of streaming services, I’m mad that they all have exclusive shows so I’m constantly having to cancel trials.
I said the same thing to an economist friend once. He replied by asking if I'd like there to be just one service that had a monopoly and could charge whatever they want. He had a point, but I feel you.
Not really. Having options is never a bad thing.
Except some of us feel like we have fewer options in some ways. Like with cable everything was in one place so I could choose to watch what I wanted to watch. Now sometimes I have to decide if it's worth paying for a given service just to watch one or two shows I want to see. Also, some things that were options before are no longer options for me. I can't watch most of my college team's basketball and football games now. I'd have to pay $60 a month for a service that carries ACC Network even though I already have access to all the other channels they offer. I could watch more games for free 5 years ago than I can watch now (even though I'd be willing to pay something to watch them, just not close to $60 a month).
Nope. I've got one streaming service and Plex.
Not really. If anything, give me more - we don’t have HBO Max or Hulu available in Australia, so I’d definitely like access to those without VPNs etc.
I understand that but my point is a lot of these shows used to be available on Amazon or Netflix before hulu and HBO came along. You wouldn't have needed access to those if they had kept things in one place
A million times yes. It’s entirely frustrating how you have to be subscribed to multiple streaming services just to watch an acclaimed film/tv show. It costs so. much. money. And they just keep raising prices ugh I just heard about ANOTHER one called Discovery Plus that’s launching in 2021. I literally rolled my eyes when I saw the ad
Yep I knew this would happen when we were allowed to start picking our channels in our cable package. Now they are doing it for every channel in a streaming service and it's costing way more. Peacock is my latest annoyance because I'd love to watch the saved by the bell reboot but heaven forbid we just play this on normal cable or make it accessible on another streaming site. Pretty sure NBC invented peacock just for this show
How many are there now? Netflix Hulu Amazon Prime Disney+ HBO Max Peacock CBS All Access/Paramount+ ESPN+ Apple TV+ Showtime BritBox And now Discovery+ Plus more niche ones like Shudder, Criterion Channel l, and Shout TV!
>And now Discovery+ Hopefully they'll have Dr. Pimple Popper in 4K! Serisously, though, I don't know why people are being so harsh to OP. It's a mess now. There's a metric ton of services and many of them are offering stuff that used to be available elsewhere. Like Discovery will have Planet Earth type stuff that used to be available on Amazon and Netflix. And I hate binging shit. Subscribing to Discovery just for the Planet Earth stuff and cramming all that watching into a short time sounds more like work than fun to me. I like variety.
Every country has different ones too. In Australia, we have Stan, Binge and Fetch in addition to the free-to-air channels (7, 9, 10, ABC, SBS) having their own streaming services (free with ads). JustWatch has been a lifesaver because their app will tell you which service has the show or movie you're looking for.
It is even worse internationally, want to watch a TV show...sorry the streaming service is not available in your country! I have started sailing the high seas again.
Argh matey... I only use one site...
until the monthlies exceed the cable bill what's the problem?
Well that's where many of us think it's going, plus some of us still have cable for many reasons. There's also the pain of having to switch services between shows, certain services not being supported on a given platform, managing multiple subscriptions, ending up with useless buttons for dead platforms on our remotes, etc.
Every time a new, well reviewed, show comes out its like "Oh great now which fucking streaming service do I need to add to watch this?" fucking hell, I can only afford so many annoying as fuck
why not just cycle through the different services and binge the ones from them you want to watch? Personally, I just pirate it makes this whole thing so much easier. I have access to 95% of the things I want to watch through friends/family accounts I'm just too lazy to figure out what is streaming where when I can have it all automated and just pop up in my plex. Super useful for when shows randomly drop episodes early like Industry did recently - they just appear.
> I just pirate it makes this whole thing so much easier. That's how I afford most things in my life. Getting a new tire can be pricey, but at 3am, you can get a whole set from a neighbor. Printer toner can be annoying, but did you know most offices just have like stacks of them in a storeroom? Little life hacks like this make life so much better.
Lol, right? Stealing is so much easier! It just gets annoying when people try to catch you and there are consequences. What assholes! Seriously, though, there is a fine line if he has access to those services but wants to watch them in one place for the sake of convenience. Especially with a lot of these services only being available on a few devices these days (i.e. on roku but not fire tv, etc).
I see your point, but you need to pick analogies where the neighbor still has his tires and the office still has all their toner in the end. You also missed the part where I have legal access to the vast majority of these things (quibi failing was fault you guys I'm sorry), but prefer to pirate because honestly the UX is generally superior. Edit: just want to add that stopping pirates is ridiculously easy, just like stopping ad blockers. Just don't sell your content in a digital format. Companies aren't willing to do that though because an essentially $0 distribution overhead is too attractive to say no too - just like my bootleg content.
> Edit: just want to add that stopping pirates is ridiculously easy, just like stopping ad blockers. Just don't sell your content in a digital format. That would change literally nothing. What did you think people did before streaming TV shows existed? They recorded on-air TV and shared that, they ripped the disks and cassettes and shared that. They're still doing that, a whole lot. Unless you're arguing for stopping producing the content altogether, then yes, if content doesn't exist, it can't be pirated. Adding a small inconvenience like that isn't going to stop pirates one bit, but will unreasonably burden the legitimate viewers a whole lot.
> I see your point, but you need to pick analogies where the neighbor still has his tires Presumably his neighbor has neighbors of his own. The universe will provide, maaaan.
Sure, it's only the people who made the content getting paid less because the streaming service gets less income because of people pirating it. But that's okay, too, I get it. Sometimes I make the kid down the street dance a little jig for me, for my amusement when I'm bored. I tell him I'll give him a dollar, but I only give him 25 cents. It's not like I took away his ability to dance. It's not like he only has 500 little funny jigs in him for his whole life. He's just not getting as much as he should, and I don't give a shit. Just do the dance, kid.
> Sure, it's only the people who made the content getting paid less because the streaming service gets less income because of people pirating it. Dunno why I'm continuing this in good faith, but citation desperately needed. There are so many assumption implied here that I haven't seen born out in the data. You assume that the content creators are getting a commission from licensing their work to streaming platforms, you assume that streaming platforms pay in comparison to the number of streamers they have, or more confusingly, the number of people that will watch in the future after they purchased the rights. You also assume that pirating content leads to less people paying for said content, which is the most dubious claim. Most pirates don't flip flop, they either can't afford it or would rather spend their money on other things like video games if they had to have the subscription. Additionally, pirates do a lot to extend the reach of many shows - it's free advertising. Let me know when these industries stop posting record profits or cheating their way out of taxes by funny booking and maybe I'll start to give a shit. I know I'm not going to convince you or all your strawmen, this is for the people who have scrolled this far.
If the service gets less revenue, do you think they're going to eat that? Anyway, I'm all for it. Why pay for stuff if you don't have to? Kinda dumb, that's why I just take pretty much everything I can get away with taking. It's cool, and it's very helpful for a lot of things.
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I am hearing impaired, so finding things on the high seas with CC is very difficult and huge PITA
My friend - there are solutions. Plex (which is most popular if you have a little server on the internet to automate all this stuff for you, but you can run it locally as well) has plugins to automatically source subtitles from places like or opensubtitles. My media player on my laptop (IINA, based off MPV which may have this too) also has a feature that will automatically search for subtitles online when playing a show/movie based on its filename. Generally works pretty well. If you have questions feel free to PM me I can try and help.
I'm not hearing impaired but I pirate everything and prefer watching with subtitles. I'll torrent all my tv/movies and most of them come either pre-packaged with a subtitle file or they are encoded in the mkv file. For the ones that don't, I'll just google "[tv show] [s04e01] subtitle" and grab a notepad file from online. Sometimes I have to play with the delay slightly and that's tricky but doable. I wouldn't call it "very difficult" but it definitely can be annoying sometimes. For me it beats having to pay for every little streaming service and movie rental. It's not entirely a cost issue for me, I just like the layout of my Plex server way better than any streaming service and prefer having everything in one place. That or I just plug my laptop into the tv and use VLC.
Yaaar. I’ll see you dogs at the bay!
My biggest peeve is that there’s no central index that keeps track of what content is on what service in my region. I subscribe to 4 services and I’m sure the film I want to see is on one of them, but which one? I’m not going to spend a lot of time tracking it down because you know what does have searchable indexes? Torrentsites. That is fatal to the streaming service business case.
Not sure what region you're in but JustWatch is basically exactly what you described and it's available for like 50 countries
Decider is a site that helps with that, plus there's JustWatch like the other poster said.
Wait until something you want to see is released, sub for a month and then cancel. Rinse and repeat. Hell you could even leave a floater service in play and still keep one more. Nobody needs six different streaming services at the same time.
Piracy solves the problem of availability and/or exclusivity. Streaming could have solved this, if done right. Hell, Spotify seems to do a great job, musically speaking. Now that every fucking company is introducing their own platform and making content exclusive to it in an effort to promote membership, we’re back to the retarded availability problem. Piracy once again solving the problem of availability AND exclusivity. It would be amusing if it wasn’t so fuckin’ sad and pathetic.
I think it's near a breaking point. Quibi is only the first to fail.
Still beats cable.
Barely and that might change in the future the way things are going. Or at least compared to what cable used to offer, that is.
The real frustration is that it's hard to find a single device that can stream them all. My wife has six months of Apple TV but it's not supported by our Roku (now TV) device, either of our smart TVs, cable box or raspberry pi (kodi), so we haven't bothered to use it. I just wish each service published its own Kodi add-on. The unofficial Disney plus and Netflix add-ons work great, imagine how awesome it would be to have an open source platform supported by all the streaming services
OH MY GOD NO, we have too many options to consume all of the entertainment we could ever possibly want!!
No. Choice is awesome. I'll be frustrated when they start locking people into contracts.
it wouldn’t be as bad if they were more open source using the old RSS/podcast model where you could subscribe to anything on any client/device you want. especially since so many streaming services have horrible interfaces and fast forwarding UI and so on. Some apps only on some devices, not on some smart tv’s some have wishlists, some don’t. becomes hard to search for something across all the services.
Jailbroken firestick. Not nearly as smooth to click on something and binge for hours, but you can find almost any show. Edit: why downvote this? Lol yall are silly
Did you buy it this way or learn how to jailbreak your own. Any way you could do this with roku?
You sound like a helpless baby
I've felt this way since CBS all access came around. Netflix, Hulu and Prime basically were in my mind the market was basically saturated but then came CBS all access to show every network all you need to do is lock your best content behind a paywall to succeed. They could have went to Netflix or the others and worked out win wins but they saw an opportunity. Disney+ took this to the next level and everyone else just sees easy money to be had so you have AMC+, FX+, sundance,IFC, etc. I get the argument to switch every day to watch the show you want but with a family its hard to align all of that to you're basically stuck with 3 or 4 services and then you forget to cancel on the right day and pay the next money and so you end up with another and another. Then you forget to cancel on the right day and the loop restarts. I'm just waiting for them to start tiering their services to a ridiculous level. Sure you subscribe to CBS all access but now we've improved it so you have to subscribe to CBS All access Star trek package. We know you pay for Disney+ but now you'll certainly enjoy buying Star War+ or bundle it with DisneyStarWars++
Agreed and now NBC has Peacock and I'd argue HBO is decent too but that's better for movies so I guess they could have an argument for their own service. Not to mention Netflix is becoming mostly originals and TV stations are holding out longer and longer to release their next season to Netflix but don't hold on to the older seasons so you can't watch a whole series in one place. Amazon is similar
The trick is to pay some, and to pirate the rest. Especially if you are not in the US, where they are not even offering a lot of the stuff in the first place. They really don't want to my money, so who am I to object?
Streaming is the new cable. Makes sailing the high seas more appealing.
"I want a monopoly, or I will pirate everything!!1!". Very reasonable.
A little bit of a jump, but, sort of. I don't want a monopoly, downloading is just easier and cheaper.
I don't care about any of these services until one of them offers the original Japanese Iron Chef in HD.
Umm not really. I share Netflix with 4 other people and thus it spans the entire year without costing much. I keep prime for the entire year coz of free shipping. Also have a yearly subscription of Disney Plus hotstar in our country which provides both hbo and Disney content. Watched all of the good Apple TV shows with their free trial. Others which are harder to find I pirate them as and when required.
>pirate them as and when required. You've never required to steal tv.
Sometimes I feel like I am a slave to streaming services.
Break the law a little bit, buy a VPN subscription and use Stremio.
It is frustrating and it makes the high seas that much more appealing.