Honestly the assumption that we want to stream everything is a really good assumption. People are lazy and setting up a proper storage is tricky and costs money. This means 99.9% of people don't want to do it. Yes being in the .1% it would be nice if we were catered to but that's life.
That is why distributed storage would be so much better. You know, if 10 people download a movie, I should be able to download it from any of those 10 people. Or all of them could send me part of the file, improving throughput.
Oh, wait, we already have that technology. Too bad we have people who have worked for twenty years to kill it.
People espouse the benefits of FLOSS all the time, but I don't understand why no one cares about libre content. I want to watch videos that I can do whatever I want with.
Why? Sure, a relatively few people will use Tivo, but many more won't. Empirically, the convenience / lack of planning necessary to watch streaming video is worth approximately 10x more.
This illustrates the importance of using data rather than anecdotes to draw conclusions. As a HN poster, our personal experience tends to be heavily biased towards our self-selected associations with more technically oriented people rather than "normal," average people.
Netflix could easily deploy on a DVR machine which could pre-buffer watch list or recommended video. There's nothing wrong with DVR technology. I suspect limitations really stem from the legal licensing distinctions between distributing video streaming vs buffer & watch-later.
The problem with Tivo is their growth was cut-off when the service providers started selling their own DVRs. Who's going to buy an extra Tivo box when your cable or satellite company sells you an all-in-one box with the ability to record multiple channels at once?
I expect the number of people who use DVRs is close to that of premium television subscribers. People who don't are cord-cutters or only receive a low-cost basic package.
Tivo is a massively outdated business model. It's still relient on a time schedule run by TV networks. I'm looking for the modern equivalent of TiVo, something that lets me save and keep the content I'm streaming.
Parent was not using an anecdote to illustrate that streaming is better/worse than downloading.
Parent was using an anecdote to prove the fact that UIs exist that allow people to store media, rather than constantly streaming it.
The DVR model is really the way to do it. People know what they want to watch, so you present a catalog of all existing and future content and let people check the box next to the ones they want to watch. Everything downloads during off-peak hours as soon as the content is available and then you always have a list of things you can watch instantly, even if the internet is slow or unavailable.
The DVR model was strangled by the same content owners & distributors that are moving to kill competitive last-mile internet access. How many cable companies rolled their own crappy set-top DVR boxes instead of working with Tivo or some other independent DVR maker.
How about smart caching? Why can't netflix automatically preload 3 episodes ahead in a show that you're watching?
Consumers might not want to have to deal with HDD storage, but I would bet you dollars to donuts that they want 4K without buffering issues.
EDIT: Also, I just wanted to mention that maybe our companies should be inventing new ways of storing things (like TiVo did with remarkable success), instead of spending all of their resources aquiring the rights to hit movies and extorting each other.
>Honestly the assumption that we want to stream everything is a really good assumption.
It's really more for the providers and cintent owners: keeps customers tethered and paying for the privilege of suckling from server teats whenever they consume content.
Because, really, storage could be made just as easy for consumers as streaming if providers had the will.
Instead, it's "put everything in the cloud, then pay us over and over again to access it".
