> The original promise of streaming was simple. Everything would be available whenever you wanted it. You could sit down in the evening and binge an entire season without waiting a week for the next episode.
That's not how I remember it. Streaming services never had everything. The promise was: there would be something you would enjoy.
There are two reasons why this isn't working for us:
1. They've cut costs and over-optimized on engagement and now frequently a streaming service will literally not have anything you want to watch.
2. We've started expecting "must-see" shows and movies. You want to watch The Pitt, and then are mad that you need to get HBO or whatever and can't just watch it on Netflix. Perhaps you could browse Netflix and find something you'd like, but you have your heart set on a specific show.
Obviously (1) is a failing of the streaming providers, but I think (2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good.
>2. We've started expecting "must-see" shows and movies. You want to watch The Pitt, and then are mad that you need to get HBO or whatever and can't just watch it on Netflix. Perhaps you could browse Netflix and find something you'd like, but you have your heart set on a specific show.
>(2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good.
I don't think this is it. People just want to be able to watch things without too much hassle and without paying too much money. Some people will enjoy following the latest trend, but there are always many more people not watching any particular show than are watching it.
The fact that torrents make it so much easier to find what you want shows that there's nothing technically difficult about this. It's all caused by stupid profit incentives which make the consumer experience so much worse than it needs to be.
> 2. We've started expecting "must-see" shows and movies. You want to watch The Pitt, and then are mad that you need to get HBO or whatever and can't just watch it on Netflix. Perhaps you could browse Netflix and find something you'd like, but you have your heart set on a specific show.
Obviously (1) is a failing of the streaming providers, but I think (2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good.
#2 is because streaming companies made a promise that they couldn’t live up to — namely, that subscribing to their service would essentially be tv on demand and we could watch the best tv had to offer without the limited scheduling of over-the-air broadcasting. Well, it turns out that one of the great benefits of network broadcasting was that everyone could watch the same show because everyone had access to the broadcast. The streaming companies are expecting subscribers to watch what’s on their service just because it’s on their service, which is exactly what regular broadcast tv had forced everyone to do. Streaming offers the option to watch anytime but not the option to watch anything, even thought that was in fact part of the original promise.
You remember incorrectly. The first real commercial on-demand streaming service to gain traction was Netflix, and it exploded in popularity precisely because it did have "almost everything". One reasonable price, practically everything worth watching. That was the original promise.
It really wasn't. Early streaming (like 2012-ish, after cord-cutting was possible but before it was mainstream) had Netflix and Hulu as the two major services, and so anything that was on streaming was on one of those two. But lots and lots of stuff just wasn't on streaming at all.
If you subscribed to Netflix back then, you probably subscribed to both the streaming and the disc-mailing plan, because there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps.
The truth is that there was a lot more available in the early days of Netflix than there is now, which with some rose-tinted glasses may very well make it seem like Netflix had everything.
It wasn't until studios caught on to the fact that streaming was going to significantly eat into cable subscription revenues that they began pulling their licenses so they could start their own streaming services.
Having everything was part of the marketing. It was just a complete lie. Everyone had that moment with Netflix where they realized every movie is in every category and there isn't nearly as much on there as it seems.
I remember ads that exaggerated things that suck about rental stores. One of them was about all the cool movies being thrown out and replaced with 30 copies of Pony Adventure 4. They never explicitly stated that Netflix will always have the solution to those problems forever, but they implied it as hard as they legally could.
Netflix had “everything” because it was the first (commercially successful) mover on streaming, and as a result it was pretty much the only game in town for a long time. Every other producer HAD to be on Netflix if they wanted to reach the streaming audiences.
It was only after their success did all the other producers feel comfortable that this was the future, started building their own apps, and then had to wait for their exclusivity contracts they had given to Netflix expire.
There was a lot of fear around what would happen to Netflix when those contracts would expire, and that’s how we started getting their originals like Stranger Things.
The 90s and earlier, yeah. But cable in the first 15 years of the 2000s is where TV peaked quality-wise. Streaming captured the max output, but peak TV quality was largely before streaming went from re-runs to new-production. The 2015-2022 era honestly watered the quality down quite a bit.
But the sense that it had "almost everything" was more a halo effect of the old dvd-by-mail business, I'd say? I do agree with the general idea that streaming is less satisfying than ever, I probably get more mileage out of my completely free (thanks to my local library) Kanopy account than I do Netflix these days, just because it really does have a wider range of stuff to watch.
What? It famously didn't on the streaming side. It had everything on DVD. For years I kept both parts of Netflix because a lot of popular shows—newer ones especially—weren't on it. So I could get DVDs of past seasons. Or go to Hulu for newer episodes.
Hulu was created at the same time, and launched in the same year as Netflix's streaming service, specifically to compete with less-convenient pirated streams of current-run TV with a free-the-next-day-with-ads alternative. And that stuff was never on Netflix at the same time.
High-profile not-on-Netflix-streaming-for-first-run things from the 2007-2014 time frame: The Office, Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, and honestly basically everything else broadcast and cable made during "Peak TV." It was big news and considered a big bet when Netflix debuted their own high-budget first-run content with House of Cards, because of how weird it was to see Netflix competing in the brand-new show space.
What the courts did to the studios back in the '40s should be done today.
Your company can either commission/produce original content OR you can be a distributor OR exhibitor. Only one.
If you abuse that it becomes a competitive disadvantage if others don't. The people making and selling the shows wouldn't want to make a deal with a studio who won't put it out for truly competitive bids.
That's why you got things like this: Universal (NBC) produced House; Fox aired it. Touchstone/ABC produced Scrubs; NBC aired the first 7 seasons. Brooklyn 99 was made by Universal, aired on Fox originally. Modern Family was made by Fox, broadcast on ABC.
(The vertical integration today even extends to exclusive deals with those show-creators to try to prevent that too. Which isn't exactly great for quality either.)
Usually Justwatch should be able to tell you where something is available. However I will note that it's remarkably common for something slightly old to just not be available anywhere. You cannot watch Das Boot in my region on any service so far as I can see. So I guess you loan from the library or buy DVDs off of ebay or something?
While it shouldn’t be necessary to resort to third party services to resolve these issues, it’s worth noting that JustWatch will tell you where a movie can be found and Letterboxd (among others) will give you a somewhat more clunky unified watchlist.
As far as "third party service shouldn't be necessary", is it that different from getting the TV Guide in the 80s or 90s to find out when a show was going to be on TV?
> There are probably a few ways to improve things. Cross-platform search should be standard by now. A shared watchlist across services would help.
Apple tried this with the TV app on their AppleTVs. It was supposed to pull all your subscriptions into one interface, searchable, with tracking and watchlists and all that good stuff. One unified app to all your content.
Then Netflix said they weren't going to play ball, so most others refused too, and now it works with only like 1/3 of streaming services out there.
Most people think of the loss of Steve Jobs passing in terms of Apple product design.
However the loss of his talent for business negotiations was at least as great a loss for Apple. He negotiated deals to get almost the entire recording industry onto iTunes. He convinced AT&T to sacrifice control of devices on their network to get an iPhone exclusive.
Maybe he would have found a way to convince Netflix to integrate their content into Apple TV.
Like most of Apple's software, it's extraordinarily annoying. It may or may not surface what you searched for, it may or may not deep link into it, it may or may not be entirely wrong. Just a huge waste of time, "free" is too expensive.
Thanks to Jellyfin + Infuse (on AppleTV), even family and visitors have no trouble using my "streaming service". And I can reach it on the road with TailScale. Takes me laughably little time per year to manage (maybe an hour in a normal year, perhaps two or three relatively "hands on" hours in a year I modify the zfs disk pool in some way)
My main motivation for having it is easy access to several things that can't be had legally at all (the best very-close-to-opening-day Star Wars movies in the 4k77/4k80/4k83 series, or uncut Beavis and Butthead episodes, or Northern Exposure with the original music, to pick a few examples) but once you've got it, adding everything to the server is arguably less effort and lost time than using a half-dozen streaming services.
I'd much rather pay, I dunno, $50/month or something for a service that had everything on it, but that doesn't exist, so I have this instead. It's a ton better than a pile of streaming services that are still missing most stuff, plus force you to play the ridiculous "which one had this, again?" game.
The thing that got me back into pirating is having to pay extra for 4k. When every bit of extra enjoyment is taxed it just kills my joy. Like a lot of people in this thread I really would much rather just pay for a good product than pirate. Thanks to steam I haven't pirated a video game since I was a teen.
And the subtitles themselves will be beautifully authored making full use of features like using color coding and positions to show who's talking. Sometimes you'll even get Area 51 technology where text appearing on signs will be edited to appear translated using only subtitles.
Any show I've googled has a widget at the top right showing me where it is, if it's included in my current subscriptions, and how much it costs without one.
It's been getting confused lately about arrangements like "Paramount+ via Amazon Prime", but it still works pretty well.
Honestly, I’ve gone back to dvd rentals! CinemaParadiso sends me as many films and boxsets as I can handle by post and it’s the same price as a standard Netflix subscription…
And it’s in blissfully high bitrate 4k! Anyone else notice that even the high quality options of streaming services are compressed to hell?!!
For a time, it was popular for movie trailers to end with a domain, often of the form "${ $TITLE }film.com", which would take you to the marketing site for that release. Nowadays there's a whole TLD specifically for movies.
It's a shame that isn't a norm for you to be able to plug a URL into a reader that consumes application-specific RSS (à la podcast clients) for the express purpose of giving notifications when that film is available (either for rent or by subscription) on a new platform.
(Ideally, of course, the media itself would be self-hosted, so you could paste the URL into e.g. VLC and encounter a platform-neutral way to negotiate payment directly with the distributor (or not and just get embedded ads—à la podcasts) and then you're off to the races.)
> Cross-platform search should be standard by now. A shared watchlist across services would help
I have a Hisense TV with Roku interface. I was always able to search a movie and it'll tell me ways to watch. Being a data engineer, I sometimes wonder how that data is collected and aggregated.
This feels like such a tired subject now. That's not to say don't complain, it's just surprising that we still haven't hit any kind of breaking point with this. I thought we were going to have a big die-off followed by re-consolidation. But somehow this is sustainable? Who is supporting all these stupid services?
IMDb shows this. But also, since the author of the blog post is seemingly German, there's http://werstreamt.es (who streams it) that does exactly that. Showing you what streams were (flatrate vs on demand).
We rejected cable tv, which bundled in different content provider packages and plans into one interface, in favor of streaming services, and now are in the process of reinventing cable.
"It's just that the ecosystem became too fragmented"
Ecosystems are either too fragmented or too monopolistic. Complain, complain, complain.
Speaking of monopolistic, just google it guys, google knows where the movies/shows stream, that is your unified interface.
The ideal outcome for users would be like how music turned out. Aside from a few attempts at exclusives, you can get all the music no matter which of a myriad of services you use. If you want to subscribe and stream, you can do that. If you want to own something, you can buy it, DRM-free.
> Ecosystems are either too fragmented or too monopolistic.
In this case, it's actually both at the same time! No, for real, that's why it sucks so bad, both of those things are simultaneously problems with the streaming service market.
Another poster in this thread has already posted my personal preferred solution, which is to do the same thing we did to movie studios and movie theater ownership for many decades, ending only a few years ago: ban combined ownership of both production and distribution.
Yeah sure. My point is that I have to leave the streaming apps and use third-party services in the first place. If finding where to watch something requires another app or website, I’d argue the ecosystem itself has a UX problem
Any suggestions on which of these are usable? justwatch.com used to be amazing, but it's increasingly getting enshittified: they seem to be intentionally making their presentation _less_ clear so they can show ads for "similar content available on…" :-(
iOS-only, but Callsheet (<https://callsheetapp.com>) is basically "What if the IMDB app didn't suck?" It uses TMDB as the data source. I love the interface, and it has JustWatch info built-in; I use it as my quick access link, so I now only use it to find where things are.
Letterboxd has this feature too, but they use JustWatch behind the scenes. I like how they implement it. I can filter a list of movies per streaming service.
That's not how I remember it. Streaming services never had everything. The promise was: there would be something you would enjoy.
There are two reasons why this isn't working for us:
1. They've cut costs and over-optimized on engagement and now frequently a streaming service will literally not have anything you want to watch.
2. We've started expecting "must-see" shows and movies. You want to watch The Pitt, and then are mad that you need to get HBO or whatever and can't just watch it on Netflix. Perhaps you could browse Netflix and find something you'd like, but you have your heart set on a specific show.
Obviously (1) is a failing of the streaming providers, but I think (2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good.
>(2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good.
I don't think this is it. People just want to be able to watch things without too much hassle and without paying too much money. Some people will enjoy following the latest trend, but there are always many more people not watching any particular show than are watching it.
The fact that torrents make it so much easier to find what you want shows that there's nothing technically difficult about this. It's all caused by stupid profit incentives which make the consumer experience so much worse than it needs to be.
#2 is because streaming companies made a promise that they couldn’t live up to — namely, that subscribing to their service would essentially be tv on demand and we could watch the best tv had to offer without the limited scheduling of over-the-air broadcasting. Well, it turns out that one of the great benefits of network broadcasting was that everyone could watch the same show because everyone had access to the broadcast. The streaming companies are expecting subscribers to watch what’s on their service just because it’s on their service, which is exactly what regular broadcast tv had forced everyone to do. Streaming offers the option to watch anytime but not the option to watch anything, even thought that was in fact part of the original promise.
If you subscribed to Netflix back then, you probably subscribed to both the streaming and the disc-mailing plan, because there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps.
It wasn't until studios caught on to the fact that streaming was going to significantly eat into cable subscription revenues that they began pulling their licenses so they could start their own streaming services.
I remember ads that exaggerated things that suck about rental stores. One of them was about all the cool movies being thrown out and replaced with 30 copies of Pony Adventure 4. They never explicitly stated that Netflix will always have the solution to those problems forever, but they implied it as hard as they legally could.
That's true today, Netflix just misses those gaps outright now.
It was only after their success did all the other producers feel comfortable that this was the future, started building their own apps, and then had to wait for their exclusivity contracts they had given to Netflix expire.
There was a lot of fear around what would happen to Netflix when those contracts would expire, and that’s how we started getting their originals like Stranger Things.
We're actually back to normal. TV before streaming was A LOT of reruns, trashy talkshows/reality TV, soaps and quiz shows.
IMDB Top shows ratings https://www.imdb.com/chart/toptv/ - the bulk of the top for scripted series are cable shows (especially HBO)
RottenTomatoes fan picks https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/rt25-fans-top-tv-... - very similar list
Hulu was created at the same time, and launched in the same year as Netflix's streaming service, specifically to compete with less-convenient pirated streams of current-run TV with a free-the-next-day-with-ads alternative. And that stuff was never on Netflix at the same time.
High-profile not-on-Netflix-streaming-for-first-run things from the 2007-2014 time frame: The Office, Game of Thrones, Walking Dead, and honestly basically everything else broadcast and cable made during "Peak TV." It was big news and considered a big bet when Netflix debuted their own high-budget first-run content with House of Cards, because of how weird it was to see Netflix competing in the brand-new show space.
That's why you got things like this: Universal (NBC) produced House; Fox aired it. Touchstone/ABC produced Scrubs; NBC aired the first 7 seasons. Brooklyn 99 was made by Universal, aired on Fox originally. Modern Family was made by Fox, broadcast on ABC.
(The vertical integration today even extends to exclusive deals with those show-creators to try to prevent that too. Which isn't exactly great for quality either.)
Apple tried this with the TV app on their AppleTVs. It was supposed to pull all your subscriptions into one interface, searchable, with tracking and watchlists and all that good stuff. One unified app to all your content.
Then Netflix said they weren't going to play ball, so most others refused too, and now it works with only like 1/3 of streaming services out there.
However the loss of his talent for business negotiations was at least as great a loss for Apple. He negotiated deals to get almost the entire recording industry onto iTunes. He convinced AT&T to sacrifice control of devices on their network to get an iPhone exclusive.
Maybe he would have found a way to convince Netflix to integrate their content into Apple TV.
My main motivation for having it is easy access to several things that can't be had legally at all (the best very-close-to-opening-day Star Wars movies in the 4k77/4k80/4k83 series, or uncut Beavis and Butthead episodes, or Northern Exposure with the original music, to pick a few examples) but once you've got it, adding everything to the server is arguably less effort and lost time than using a half-dozen streaming services.
I'd much rather pay, I dunno, $50/month or something for a service that had everything on it, but that doesn't exist, so I have this instead. It's a ton better than a pile of streaming services that are still missing most stuff, plus force you to play the ridiculous "which one had this, again?" game.
https://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg
It's been getting confused lately about arrangements like "Paramount+ via Amazon Prime", but it still works pretty well.
Piracy in the 90s and early aughts mostly didn’t solve for price so much as for distribution and availability.
- my imdb watchlist with completed items runs more than 1000 movies long
- my incomplete is another 1000+ movies
- i have never used a single streaming service in my life yet
- torrented every single one of them
- if a movie is spectacular, i ll watch it at the theatre
https://reelgood.com/
And it’s in blissfully high bitrate 4k! Anyone else notice that even the high quality options of streaming services are compressed to hell?!!
It's a shame that isn't a norm for you to be able to plug a URL into a reader that consumes application-specific RSS (à la podcast clients) for the express purpose of giving notifications when that film is available (either for rent or by subscription) on a new platform.
(Ideally, of course, the media itself would be self-hosted, so you could paste the URL into e.g. VLC and encounter a platform-neutral way to negotiate payment directly with the distributor (or not and just get embedded ads—à la podcasts) and then you're off to the races.)
I have a Hisense TV with Roku interface. I was always able to search a movie and it'll tell me ways to watch. Being a data engineer, I sometimes wonder how that data is collected and aggregated.
The ads are what get me.
Ecosystems are either too fragmented or too monopolistic. Complain, complain, complain. Speaking of monopolistic, just google it guys, google knows where the movies/shows stream, that is your unified interface.
In this case, it's actually both at the same time! No, for real, that's why it sucks so bad, both of those things are simultaneously problems with the streaming service market.
Another poster in this thread has already posted my personal preferred solution, which is to do the same thing we did to movie studios and movie theater ownership for many decades, ending only a few years ago: ban combined ownership of both production and distribution.
https://imdb.com
https://www.justwatch.com/
https://streamsearchup.com/
https://www.wheretowatch.stream/
https://streamfinder.co/
https://findmystreams.com/
https://lookupvod.com/en
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPw-gDw6Nxk
https://toomuchmedia.online/