
Streaming Video Will Soon Look Like the Bad Old Days of TV - jmsflknr
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/opinion/netflix-hulu-cable.html
======
mantap
For me this future has already arrived. Yesterday I cancelled Netflix because
I realized that even if I pay money each month for legal content, I still have
to pirate the content that is not on Netflix. Asking people to subscribe to
multiple streaming services is not just expensive but also crazy inconvenient.

By contrast the music industry manages to cooperate and get their content
available across the various streaming services and consequently I haven't
pirated music for a long long time.

~~~
d1zzy
And Plex is just getting better and better:

\- Netflix-like UI with integrated IMDB ratings, cast, description, cover, etc

\- support for many devices and TV players/dongles

\- unlimited concurrent stream count and full control over the streaming
bitrate (as long as you have the bandwidth)

\- remote access from any location/country

~~~
jammygit
According to one of Jaron Lanier's books, the 'musician as a middle class job'
has pretty much vanished because of all the piracy and streaming services.
Plex is wonderful, but its nice that people can make a good living making the
content too.

~~~
freehunter
I'm going to have to agree with the other people who have commented so far.
Music has never really been a middle class job. But I'm going to disagree with
the entire premise that streaming and piracy have killed the middle class
musician. I'm going to argue that streaming and piracy _created_ the middle
class musician.

Are there people living middle class lives in the music industry? Sure.
Probably more today than ever before, and streaming (and possibly piracy) has
a lot to do with that. Musicians don't make money from album sales, they make
money from live shows. The middle class musician tours constantly because
that's their full time job. It's not a 9-5, and you're not home with your
family at night. I'm absolutely positive that _this_ is the reason more people
don't live middle class musician lifestyles.

Vanished? Nah. Never existed, at least not in any significant way. It's only
now due to the Internet that small time niche musicians can make _any_ money
and get _any_ sales without major labels. And major labels aren't in the
business of making middle class musicians, as Jaron Lanier pointed out.

I'm also going to detour to your source... Jaron Lanier is famous for writing
the story "Piracy is your friend", and a few years later writing "Pay me for
my content". I would take Jaron Lanier's music industry opinions with a grain
of salt.

~~~
LevGoldstein
Define significant. Session musicians were definitely a thing that earned a
middle-class lifestyle during the last century, at least in larger markets. Of
course, samplers and sample libraries likely had a larger impact on reducing
the viability of that lifestyle (no need to hire everyone necessary for the
string section on these three tracks when Kontakt and the one intern who knows
his way around automating expressions will do), but shrinking studio budgets
due to the impact of piracy helped put the nail in the coffin.

------
ArlenBales
One upside to streaming services is how easy they are to cancel and resume.

I regularly suspend and resume Netflix, HBO Now, etc. based on what I'm
currently watching. It's very easy to do this, especially if the service is
paid for using Google Store / Apple Store subscriptions.

Compare to the hell you go through trying to contact Comcast and cancel
service.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
I picture a meta-service that manages this. When you click to play a show, it
quickly and automatically signs you up for whichever service, and if you
haven't watched a show on that service for more than 2 weeks, it cancels your
subscription. Presumably the problem would be that streaming sites might not
like customers canceling their service 4 or 5 times per year.

~~~
godelski
It's a better alternative than consumers turning to piracy. Let's be real,
it's making a comeback because of this. The market is getting too saturated
for everyone to charge $15/mo. Prices have to drop or another option is
needed, or else we'll again see the piracy that Netflix "destroyed".

~~~
colechristensen
I would much prefer a blanket ban on production and distribution in the same
company.

We would have none of these problems if Netflix couldn't produce its own shows
and Disney couldn't make its own streaming service

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures%2C_Inc).

~~~
scarface74
Would you also be okay if software developers couldn’t distribute their own
software?

~~~
colechristensen
There aren't problems with shops selling their own product as long as their
core competence is making that product.

There is a problem when a store with significant market share starts paying to
produce product it controls.

~~~
TeMPOraL
There is always a problem if a shop has exclusive right to sell a non-
commodity product.

~~~
scarface74
In that case all software vendors should have to use third party resellers? No
one should be able to exclusively sell their own products on their own site?

------
lesinski
Netflix has reshaped the whole industry for the better. Netflix by itself at
$13 per month is nearly as much content as you'd get in a small cable package
in the "old days of TV." Of course, in the future, if you actually tried to
watch everything available, you'd be paying for some crazy mega-bundle like
the old cable days. Otherwise, things are clearly better as Netflix runs away
with streaming and forces the other media companies to compete.

~~~
losteric
Eh... it's turning out that Netflix just introduced a new medium for cable.

Now that every content owner is starting their own services, we're losing the
thing that made Netflix revolutionary: loads of quality and diverse content
under one subscription.

Personally, the shows I'm interested in are spread across a half dozen
services... and only one or two really warrant full engagement (versus
"background entertainment")... so obviously it's back to bittorrent for me.

~~~
glaberficken
i'm wondering the same. currently a Netflix subscriber. but back in the day i
had a NAS box hitting a preconfigured rss feed with the shows i watched. was
pretty convenient and the NAS could stream to every device on my wifi

~~~
xnyan
[https://sonarr.tv](https://sonarr.tv).

------
gregmac
With old TV, you at least had a unified interface - channel numbers or DVR -
to access everything. You were also a bit limited with devices - TV of course
worked, but being able to use a pc, tablet or phone was only for the few of us
savvy enough to run something like mythtv.

Removing price and commercials from the discussion, the big benefit streaming
brought was a way to overcome the technical limitation that meant there was a
broadcast schedule. Instead, you can watch any show at any time.

The new services are much worse about several of these. Let's again assume
price is a non issue so you subscribe to everything.

First, you have annoying problem of remembering which service or app to use
for each show. If available on multiple services, you have to remember which
one you were watching on so it preserves your place.

Second, you also have problems with availability: service x doesn't work on
device A, but service y _only_ works on device A. This means switching inputs,
or limiting what show you can watch based on what devices you currently have
available. There's even more frustrating problems with this, where for
example, service x will work on PC, but not with surround sound.

Third, you have to use a different user interface and navigation structure for
each app. Annoyingly, these will sometimes update and change their UI in
radical ways without asking, and these changes won't happen on all devices at
the same time, so you have even more interfaces to remember.

This reminds me of the old "pirate vs paying customer" infographic [1] where
the overall experience is markedly worse for paying customers.

I haven't had cable for over a decade, and when I did, it was all PVR'd via
mythtv. My tv watching experience has been via mythtv, xbmc, Kodi and Plex. I
tolerate Netflix for convenience, and YouTube as a separate app because it's
unique. I've tried having other services, but found them too annoying for the
reasons I started above - and it didn't help that they all had significantly
_worse_ interfaces than Plex and Netflix.

[1] [https://m.imgur.com/gallery/DnQYR8S](https://m.imgur.com/gallery/DnQYR8S)

~~~
jessriedel
In general, the fact that UI is tied to content is stupid and probably
indicates market failure. It's frustrating that I'm stuck with Spotify's one-
size-fits-all UI when the large majority of the monthly payment goes to
licensing the music.

~~~
hdfbdtbcdg
Is libspotify dead now? There used to be e.g. a Clementine plugin which worked
pretty well.

~~~
jessriedel
Looks dead.

[https://github.com/hbashton/spotify-
ripper/issues/39](https://github.com/hbashton/spotify-ripper/issues/39)
[https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/2016/03/22/rece...](https://developer.spotify.com/community/news/2016/03/22/recent-
issues-libspotify/) [https://jonaslundqvist.net/2015/05/06/do-not-use-
libspotify/](https://jonaslundqvist.net/2015/05/06/do-not-use-libspotify/)

------
zwayhowder
The biggest game changer for me with streaming is I watch less TV. Before
streaming I either had to maintain a complex balance with my never large
enough DVR or watch shows when the network decided (I'm looking at you Channel
9 in Australia putting Star Trek on at 11pm on Tuesday and Thursday nights).
Before that I had VHS, so many VHS.

With streaming I watch maybe an hour or two at most, then I stop, confident I
can pickup whenever (and increasingly wherever I want). I don't worry about my
wife deleting my Star Trek for her Firefly.

Unlike DVDs we can catch up on an episode of a shared show while traveling.

Though I did get hooked on a Netflix show in the UK that isn't available in
Australia, four weeks later I can't even remember the title.

------
evo_9
Glad I kept my torrent/VPN box ready to go. I was happy to pay a small
reasonable fee but it’s clear things are just turning into the overpriced
nickel-and-dimming shit-show we had not even 10 years back. So yeah I’ll pull
what I actually watch and they get nothing again.

~~~
rolltiide
Yesterday I wanted to watch a movie that was in theatres in spring.

I checked Netflix, of course not there I should have known better, oh but it
knew what I was looking for and showed me knockoffs "related to" what I was
actually looking for. Having spent most of my life making fun of knockoffs,
that was a bad move Netflix.

I checked Amazon Video, hey the movie is there, but not included in my prime
subscription, and I can only stream it if I buy the movie for $20, no option
to even rent the movie for 48 hours. Okay, thats a non-starter, I know Amazon
Video just resyndicates from a shared catalogue of movies so that means every
rent-streaming service will have it, but maybe under different pricing.

So I checked the unlikely Playstation Store. Not listed

Okay at this point I go to Google, because the "where can I stream it" sites
have been replaced by a mere addition of a feature on Google where on top of
the search results underneath the ratings it shows you where you can stream
it. Exhibit A of features masquerading as companies getting replaced quickly
by Google. Showed that everyone was charging $20 with no option to rent.

Well, I was going to rent it. Other interfaces should have an easy search that
shows the availability of a title on multiple streaming services and its
price. But after this bar, if you wanted me to stop worrying about who has a
license for copyright distribution, thats how you get me to stop worrying
about who has a license. The burden has never been on the consumer anyway,
we've just been assuming Walmart properly secured the license, and that the
person with DVDs on a towel outside doesn't. But we never knew and never had
any liability, until we were distributing it ourselves. So fire up the dusty
old torrent software and turn off the upload feature. Within 10 minutes I was
watching my 4gb H264 1080P version of what I wanted to see.

~~~
dwild
> Yesterday I wanted to watch a movie that was in theatres in spring.

That's sadly most likely the issue. I bet it was a big movie? Most likely they
are just keeping the good old traditional schedule. Release at the movie
Theater, few months later release for sell, few months later release for
rental. They added a few months later a release on streaming platform but
that's it...

That's absurd that they still do that but I guess waiting a few months isn't
the worse to save a few bucks.

~~~
rolltiide
Was not a big movie, < $100m box office, just a bad user experience :)

------
nsxwolf
I’m feeling nostalgic for the days of paying $2 an episode on iTunes. The
future where there’s 10 shows I want to watch and I have to pay for 10
separate $15 monthly services to watch them is almost here and it sucks. I
also get to learn 10 different app UIs to watch them, and enjoy constantly
logging back into them all whenever whatever box I’m using randomly logs them
out.

~~~
scarface74
Why feel nostalgic? You still can.

~~~
nsxwolf
If I want to watch any of the new Star Trek series I’m going to have to bite
the bullet and subscribe to CBS. For starters.

Netflix is another given. Do these content channels even release shows on Blu
ray and iTunes a year later like they used to?

~~~
scarface74
Why is that bad thing? Typically individual episodes are $2.99. You can sign
in on the app for a month, immediately cancel so you don’t get charged for an
additional month and pay $6.

~~~
nsxwolf
I don't even mind the expense so much. It's the experience. I'd happily pay
more just to have TV watching be a pleasure. This whole app experience where
you have to pull out your phone and log into some site over and over again
when it "forgets", learn multiple UIs, have commercials that mess with you
(Choose a commercial to "interact" with for 3 commercials, or choose to watch
6 commercials!)

It's just awful. It makes me miss CRTs with rabbit ears and a VHF and UHF
dial.

~~~
scarface74
I agree somewhat. But I have an Apple TV 4K. The CBS All Access app knows that
I’ve already subscribed through iTunes and I subscribe to the no commercials
subscription.

As far as apps that use your provider log in, with the Apple TV, you log on
once with your provider and with your permission, all of the apps use your
system configured login.

------
gargravarr
A while back, I was in this exact situation. I got into The Expanse (which, if
you like hard sci-fi, you definitely need to check out, it's superbly made). I
have a Netflix subscription, obviously. I devoured the first two seasons on
there. Then I discovered that Season 3 onwards would be an Amazon exclusive.
Then I discovered that Seasons 1 & 2 had _also_ moved to Amazon. I don't have
a Prime subscription any more because I can't justify it (and I don't want to
be tempted to buy more useless junk than I already own). I managed to get
another free trial long enough to watch Season 3, but not long enough to re-
watch the previous two seasons. But when Season 4 comes out, I'm going to be
in exactly the same situation as satellite TV - I don't want to watch anything
else on Amazon Prime Video, I just want The Expanse. But I'll have to get a
Prime subscription if I want to watch it before it comes out on Blu-Ray, and
thus everything that comes with it, which to me is just junk.

Cord-cutting accomplished exactly nothing. Streaming services copied the exact
model of the satellite companies (willingly or not; I'm willing to bet the
distributors squeezed the streaming companies just like music publishers,
since they're holding all the rights). There is no incentive whatsoever to
make a single show available on multiple platforms.

This also explains perfectly why piracy will never die. Consumers want access
to the content they are interested in. They do NOT want arbitrary
complications thrown in their way.

------
RIMR
A return to the bad old days of cable bundles, coupled with the current
average Internet speed, would just bring back the good old days of torrenting.

~~~
NegatioN
This is exactly what I feel I've been driven to this last year. I don't want
to have all my media spread around on a tenfold different streaming providers,
nor do I want to live with the random removals of offerings that seem to
happening more and more where I live.

The day I have children I want to be able to share some sort of cultural
archive with them, though regular tv might probably be dead by that time, who
knows.

I've started hosting my own plex server, and using torrents and actual old
backups to get the content. The sad part though, is that most of the major
torrent sites seem really dead compared to the haydays. What are some good
options these days?

~~~
RandomBacon
I miss TvTorrents.

It had hard-to-find shows, and it kept track of who downloaded what, so if
there were no active seeders, you could ping some people to seed it so they
could earn credits.

------
toupeira
I want something like Bandcamp for movies and TV shows. Let me buy and
download the damn things in full quality and watch them
wherever/whenever/however I want them! Give me RSS/Atom feeds I can subscribe
to and integrate into other tools!

I'd be more than happy to pay good money for each movie/episode, and would
regularly pay more than the suggested price to creators I especially enjoy,
like you can do on Bandcamp.

~~~
chwilson
I believe Vimeo used to do something like this - iirc once you bought a movie
you could download the original as well. Don't think it moved past a few
independent films/series though.

------
Buttons840
Startup idea: Make a website where I can push a single button to pay for and
activate one month of a streaming service. Make the one month subscription
expire at the end of the month automatically (no auto-renew).

This way I avoid paying for time during which I watch nothing, and I can
easily activate a new month almost instantly.

~~~
Klathmon
One poblem with that idea:

Many streaming services are quite shitty, don't allow you to link directly to
a show, and don't allow streaming on PC (or don't allow it any higher than
standard def), and most people want to watch their TV on TVs, which means your
service needs to work with the various services available on the various
common streaming hardware.

I swear Google Play Movies is the most convoluted difficult to use UI to play
video I've ever seen. I bought a show in it once, but I bought the entire
series, which shows up in the UI separately from every other season. (So it
shows as seasons "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1 through 6"). Every time I want to watch
an episode, I need to open, go to my library, go to TV shows, pick the show,
scroll to the "full series" season, then scroll from episode 1 to the episode
I last watched to play it.

It's insane that it's that difficult! And knowing how difficult it is I
absolutely will never order another show from that ecosystem again.

~~~
amaccuish
In all fairness, I get the feeling that a lot of Google services are there
because Google has to have them. Apple have them. When people buy an Android
they want somewhere they can go to get stuff. But for Google, that's it.
There's very little extra effort expended to make it nice to use. They've just
ticked a box. They offer films. That's it. It'll sit there and gather dust for
a few years before Google sees that competitors have moved on, so they go and
give their service a face lift. Then another 5 years of nothing.

------
edgarvaldes
Is it reasonable to expect an all-in-one streaming service? There is a lot of
media, old and new, local and foreign. I don't know if a single provider can
give you all the access a person wants for a price that the consumer is
willing to pay.

~~~
dmitrygr
[http://thepiratebay.org](http://thepiratebay.org) does. Like the good old
days.

And the media companies did it to themselves...

~~~
z3c0
I get the humor in your statement, but there's a lot of truth there. At the
end of the day, when Netflix, Hulu, and Prime don't have it, tpb does. In
perfect, uninterrupted HD. The only downside? Waiting 5 minutes for it to
download. It's hard to justify the $15/mo I'm paying for Netflix when that is
an option, and especially hard to justify paying for all 3 (which I'm doing,
for some reason.)

~~~
adjkant
> which I'm doing, for some reason

Convenience has value. Even if tpb is easy enough, there's still friction. So
long as streaming services stay convenient and cheap enough, they will keep
customers. The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space,
the less convenience there is. Justwatch.com is already trying to add that
convenience back, but the fact that we need that meta step is already
frustrating.

~~~
nwallin
Maybe it's just because I was doing it for 10 years until Netflix got good,
but now that Netflix no longer cuts it for 90% of what I want to watch it has
been _really_ easy to slip back into pirating.

> The interesting dynamic is that the more players enter the space, the less
> convenience there is.

This is exactly what happened to me. When Netflix had literally everything, it
was the only place I looked. Now that it doesn't have everything, I'm not
going to go through the litany of Hulu, prime, etc, I just go straight to tpb.
So I cancelled Hulu etc. And because tpb is second nature and it always has
what I'm looking for, I just go there first... so I cancelled Netflix.

It's like watching the 2000 p2p shift all over again. The media companies
don't understand how to build a business model that fits seemlessly into
society.

------
ladyattis
For me, I just don't watch as much TV content anymore. It's odd too since I
still watch video but not what you would call TV content. Let's Plays,
restoration videos, explanation videos, and the like are most of my content
these days. Even videos about philosophy and politics (/r/BreadTube is Best
Tube, hehehehehehe), so it's not the usual stuff I use to watch like scifi
shows or Star Trek on repeat. In a way, I think the whole streaming
Balkanization just gave me an excuse to expand beyond the old formats and
genres.

------
jesbickhart
I'm fascinated by this problem: How would consumers navigate a third-party
aggregation application? It seems to me there needs to be a free "Kayak"-like
service for film & tv discovery. Show me only what I can watch for free
(because I already subscribe to my favorite channels). Develop the application
on every OS that I watch content (TV, Mobile and Web).

Would consumers like navigating a UI similar to Pinterest (boards) or Spotify
(playlists) on your TV? It works well for images and music...

~~~
silverfox17
My Roku TV does this - you type in a title, and it will show you what apps
provides the movie, the prices for each, etc.

~~~
jesbickhart
Google does too. I'm talking about discovery - most people don't know what
they want to watch when they sit down in front of the TV.

I've found myself scrolling for 20-30min sometimes just looking through
Netflix, then Prime, then Hulu, then HBO... just to end up watching Friends
again..

------
weq
The false dictonomy of "disruption" is laid bare before us.

Disrupting an industry, is nothing more then bending the rules with technology
as to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Long term, the disrupter needs to protect its
userbase, and ends up becoming the monolith that it replaced.

History repeating itself is nothing new. Its a cycle every generation goes
through.

------
seph-reed
If braves BAT (Basic Attention Token) thing could ever really take off, it'd
make for a nice solution to all of this. Just sort of pitch a penny here or
there, and after enough people pitching pennies the content has earned a
worthy revenue.

------
SignalsFromBob
Don't forget about your local library. I subscribe to Netflix, but I watch
more movies and shows that I get on DVD and bluray from my library than I
watch stuff on Netflix.

------
ohiovr
Everything is free on channel 4, 6, 10, and uhf

------
butterfi
Interesting-FF says that nytimes.com is unsafe

~~~
tsukurimashou
browser update, or you're getting MiTM?

~~~
butterfi
My FF is up to date. I’m on NordVPN, maybe it is a time issue?

