Thread

1. avgDev · 1790264764 · focus · HN ↗

   Oof. I guess sailing the high sees is back on the table.

   We are back to cable pricing, but shows and movies are all over the place and now we need multiple apps to track us.

   1. joshstrange · 1790265240 · focus · HN ↗

      We are worse than cable pricing at this point from what I can see.

      It's absurd that piracy is the _best_ user experience. 1 app, 1 place for your content, no licensing deals to worry about, no outrage pulling old episodes, local streaming, the list goes on.

      You literally cannot pay (legally) for a better experience, and that makes me sad.

      1. f33d5173 · 1790273292 · focus · HN ↗

         Movies are expensive to make, and watching them on streaming gives almost no money back to the studio. The intention is that if you want to watch a movie, you should pay the $5-10 it costs to do so on any of a number of platforms. Then you get the great user experience of putting any movie you like into the search bar and pressing "play", and the studio gets appropriately compensated. Putting a movie on a streaming service is a way for studios to double dip, to get a smaller amount of money from people who don't care which movie exactly they watch. If you have a particular movie in mind to watch, or don't like the fare on whichever service you're subscribed to, you should be paying a la carte for movies instead. If you aren't, don't pretend it's some moral stand and not just you being a cheapskate.

         1. joshstrange · 1790273925 · focus · HN ↗

            > If you aren't, don't pretend it's some moral stand and not just you being a cheapskate.

            sigh please read what I wrote, I didn’t say piracy is morally justified, I said it’s annoying that paying all the services for access to content (side note: I don’t care about movies, when I watch anything it’s normally TV) you get an objectively worse experience when compared to someone who pirated the same media.

            Spotify was able to crush music piracy because they provided a better experience. I find it annoying that the same is not true for video. There was a small golden era of Netflix then it all went to shit.

            Lastly, the economics of stream vs buy (license or physical media) is completely irrelevant to this discussion. Mostly because there is plenty of media I care about that is near impossible or completely impossible to buy physical media (my preference, then ripped to Plex). If every show I wanted was available on BluRay or similar quality then this wouldn’t be a discussion, or at least not one I cared about. I find it frustrating that there is no legal way to acquire all the content I want and so I’m forced to pay for shitty streaming platforms.

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