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

I've been using Plex for probably 5 years now and it's the best (only?) software I know of for its purpose, but I haven't seen it "getting better and better" as you say. From my perspective it's had more or less the same useful functionality since I started using it, and my biggest annoyances with it -- the overall flakiness of the apps, syncing, and Chromecast integration, as compared with Netflix -- haven't gotten any better.

But I'm still really glad it exists and don't really feel I have much right to complain about a free (for me) product.

(Edit: okay, to give credit where it's due, I just remembered they did actually fix my biggest annoyance with the iOS app -- previously when you deleted a downloaded video it didn't actually delete it from disk -- there was no way to recover the storage, other than deleting the app itself. So I'd have to reinstall the app every time I took a flight more or less. But they fixed that, you can actually delete things now.)

> only

https://emby.media/

https://jellyfin.media/

https://kodi.tv/

https://mrmc.tv/

https://firecore.com/infuse

I have never heard of mrmc or infuse, but aren't they (along with Kodi) essentially just media _players_? And as much as I want to use jellyfin, it's not exactly ready on the platforms I want to use it for (although it's in the works). That leaves Emby, which doesn't have nearly the polish (although I just switched to it and an very happy with it). Not exactly a huge selection of choices...

Kodi is definitely more than a player, it's a full media library. If it doesn't do what you want out of the box (and it mostly does, categorising and metadata etc.), then plugins can handle the rest.

I've tested and used all of these. Emby was a slightly different Plex with several weakneses and some strengths. It was free, now its fremium like Plex. None of the others have native applications for both android and iOS. Infuse is nice if you have an all iOS ecosystem.

update - Kodi has an iOS application if you have a jailbroken an iPhone with iOS 8.

I've been using Plex for a good 3 or 4 years now, and have upgraded through a good half dozen or so version upgrades. What disappointed me the most is that their support for subtitles has gotten progressively worse over time. I did all the tricks to try and make subtitles work, whether embedded or not, but in the end I found it easier just to navigate to the folder on my NAS and open the .mkv in VLC, which recognises embedded subtitles no problem!

I used mediatomb ages ago, and now Kodi (formerly XBMC). Works great.

Yes, and that's the main reason I use Plex nowadays. I mostly stopped using it as virtually everything I want to watch is on legal streaming services in the UK. However even when content is available, on some services the UX is so awful I'm driven to download it elsewhere. For example, even though Handmaid's Tale is available on All4 in the UK, their app and player are so awful it was easier to go through the rigmarole of illegal downloads so I can use Plex instead.

The Netflix UI is atrocious. It feeds the same content in a loop. I never seem to find anything and much prefer HBO Go's UI wich reverse sorts content by date.

On my new Samsung tv, the Netflix app also has a SUPER annoying auto play trailer feature THAT YOU CANNOT DISABLE. I am just trying to scroll through the list and literally everything I stop on immediately starts playing audio/video content. Absolutely horrible design that has greatly diminished my experience to the point where I almost don't want to use it anymore. The only way I've managed to cope is to keep the TV muted until I actually select something and try to avoid looking at the video preview that often contains spoilers.

there has not been a single time when "watch again" was useful to me, why is that even there?

Sadly, the UI seems designed to force you watch Netflix content, and hide the fact the catalog is small (is it? I can't tell).

It's the number one reason I'm going to drop netflix, when I get too fed up.

Children live to watch the same shows multiple times.

indeed, but they have a "kids" account for that :)

I actually get the impression that the catalog IS small from the current Netflix UI.

HBO go on anything but a PC is painful to use. Continue watching is completely broken on the xbox app. The whole thing feels like it's 10 years old with all the mistakes and clunkiness. Instead of a nice xbox native keyboard popup to search, you literally scroll through the entire alphabet and it's barely responsive.

The HBO Go app is buggy but the UI is better, despite feeling older IMHO. On Apple devices is works okay save for some old iPad where it fails randomly.

Is it only me but Plex never worked stably on tvOS. The transcoding stops every 20 minutes and the movie freeze, forcing me to restart it. I suspect it's only with the mkv container and when using subtitles... Besides that, it forces you to transcode, and you need to subscribe to have native decoding. I use Plex for many years, even wrote and published plug-ins for it, but I could never convince me to subscribe. There are too many quirks that make me think let's wait until it works...

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.

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.

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.

Is there actual data on this? I did not think the tail of professional musicians was ever fat enough to support a sizeable middle class. Mostly just a handful of megastars (who today are indeed capturing a smaller fraction of the value they create) and a large population of struggling musicians that have always supported themselves through other means.

He says he 'went looking for them.' I dug around a bit and there's not a lot of really concrete numbers. Here's what I found:

> Since 2000, the number of full-time songwriters in Nashville has fallen by 80 percent, according to the Nashville Songwriters Association International

https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2015/01...

> According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 39,260 people in the United States classified as “Musicians and Singers.” This is down 27% from 53,940 in 2002.

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir...

> At the same time, consumers spent less money on recorded music (both physically and digitally distributed) than they had in the 1990s.[13] Total "music-business" revenues in the U.S. dropped by half, from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research.[14]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry

> For many musicians, the income derived from sound recordings is a small part of their overall revenue pie, and it’s decreasing. In aggregate, 88% of survey respondents derived between 0% and 10% of their music-related income from sound recordings in the past 12 months. Respondents who identified themselves as composers and/or recording artists were making a bit more, as were rock and hip hop musicians, but even when examined through various lenses like role or genre, income from sound recordings hovered under 15% of music-related income. Though differences exist by role and/or genre, the survey data suggests that income from sound recordings is a modest slice of most musicians’ income pies – a sentiment also expressed by a number of interviewees.

http://money.futureofmusic.org/sound-recording-income/9/

also relevant for the TV industry:

> According to the Writers Guild Association – West, screenwriters’ earnings were down nearly 25 percent in 2013 from 2009.

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/07/16/if-you-think-pir...

Thanks! The first quote is indeed a useful bit of evidence. the second one doesn't help us distinguish from the alternative hypothesis where almost all musician income is collected by a very small number of very wealthy people, with few middle class people in the first place.

It was interesting trying to find reliable stats on this. I might look into it more one day in the future

Music, along with other creative endeavors, is primarily a recreational pursuit. It's not socially necessary labor. A century of paying for the physical media necessary to transmit worthless (in a non-perjorative sense) ideas tricked many of us into thinking we were buying music itself. The true value of art reveals itself when these media are removed from the equation.

It's a net good for culture in the grand scheme of things. I'm hoping most professions eventually vanish along with musicians, including my own.

Music is like writing: the tools to create and distribute it have such low barriers to entry now that any sufficiently talented person can compete with the best in the industry.

Film isn't there yet. A solo director can't produce a Marvel movie on their own. But it's becoming easier every day.

Most musicians make their bread on tour or gigging.

Most musicians tour? Hmm. I don't have stats, but I doubt 95%+ of musicians ever tour, or hardly ever. The vast majority of musicians I know (musician here) pay their bills, support their kids etc by regular teaching, supplemented by gigs. Virtually all gigs are very low-paying compared to a few decades ago. A bass player friend told me that in a big city music venue, in the 1980s he was making 10x what the bar staff were; now they get paid more per hour.

> 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.

It sounds like you're saying that if there's any video you'd like to see that's not available on Netflix, you have no alternative to pirating it.

What would be the fallout if you didn't pirate those videos?

The choice is not between Netflix and piracy. I can't speak for the original poster, but for me Netflix' appeal was that I had a wide selection of content available for a single price in a single subscription, making it an attractive competitor to buying and/or renting single movies and series. With the fragmentation of the streaming landscape they have lost that competitive edge, and if it wasn't for the Netflix-exclusive series that justify the monthly price for me, I would probably have cancelled too.

A streaming service is attractive when the monthly cost is less than what you would pay for the seperate content you actually watch, and if all the content you want is offered on that service. Needing to subscribe to multiple services can quickly balloon the cost and inconvencience to the point where it's easier and cheaper to just seek out individual content - either legally or illegally, the result is the same for Netflix.

Personally, I have no qualms avoiding paying 3.99 or whatever to rent a digital file that made its money back thrice over before it left theaters.

“You wouldn’t download a car” arguments aside - what is the ethical boundary for “They’ve made enough money - I’m entitled to enjoy it for free” ?

I agree, that's the kernel of the issue here.

TL;DR: I'm curious if there's a way to make effective ethical arguments when people have fundamentally different world views, including whether or not morals have any solid grounding.

You can judge a moral system by how society would evolve if everyone followed it.

If nobody pirated anything then we would still be buying music for 99 cents a track (or more) and music streaming would have been quashed by the labels.

On the other hand if everybody pirated everything then the music industry would have collapsed.

I conclude that the world needs all sorts of people.

I don't pirate anything, but maybe one reason people do is that getting things spoiled before you watch it can be a serious problem.

> 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.

I canceled Netflix because it got to having nothing I wanted to watch, and my public library network has a much better catalog of movies and TV series on Blu-ray and DVD.

My public library even has video streaming for tons of titles

It's more like record labels aren't vertically integrated. Sony used to be, but piracy and the iPod made that less relevant just as streaming became viable. I'm an ex-Spotifier. The story we got was that piracy had disrupted the music industry so much it brought the majors to the bargaining table. This is completely different than the state of movies and TV shows.

Netflix back-doored and and muscled its way in, but it never had even close to a full catalog, so it had to compete with its own content. The other big difference is that we associate TV shows with their distributors (GoT was on HBO, House of Cards Netflix, Seinfeld NBC, etc.) Artists and labels? Unless you're looking at something indie like Fat Wreck Chords, nope, most people couldn't tell you who artists are signed to.

Which is a total shame, because those labels are the best discovery engines! If you want a great source of new content, that's effectively their full time job. The distribution and content quality of Tiny Engines, Topshelf Records, Polyvinyl is so so much better than anything Spotify will try to algorithm up for me.

(typing this while rocking my Fat Wreck jacket and playing Direct Hit!)

I can't seem to find it, but in the past year, I read an article on how cheap compilations (could have been Fat Music) were a really effective way to promote bands in that genre. Bands would talk about doing shows, and once they play the song on the compilation CD, everyone sings along.

You can still look at those releases and use spotify. No one is forcing you to look at their half baked playlists. Personally, I think the user playlists are the best part of the entire service.

I am planning to cancel Netflix depending on how good the contents on Disney Plus is and how much ads it has. I have found myself spending more time looking for things to watch in Netflix comparing to watching them. Recently, I discovered the Roku channel. It has limited selections including decent family titles, too. It has ads but is limited to 1 or 2 15-second ads that are kid-friendly (like Goldfish cracker) when I watched Rango yesterday with my daughter. It’s sad that the promising land of digital streaming platform is deteriorating to what cable has become.

It also doesn’t cost $100 million to make an album.

Who cares when the investment was recouped 3x at the box office alone. Hollywood makes money hand over fist at the box office and clammoring about lost DVD sales is clammoring about icing on the cake. Movies like infinity war make several orders of magnitude more money at the box office than home release.

> Movies like infinity war make several orders of magnitude more money at the box office than home release.

Your example is the world record at the box office... they don't all gain as much.

Plenty of movies and TV shows depends on the cash they make from streaming service. Hell it's not even yours to decide whether they made enough profit. Why not make your own movie if that so profitable? You know damn well it's not that profitable and most struggle.

Not only that, experts predict that Infinity War will be less profitable on an ROI basis than movies that generated less revenue because of actors salaries.

That’s not true. Movie studios have been making more money from non theatre sources since the 90s.

Not all movies do well at the box office, there's plenty of flops as well.

There's reason to believe that a shared catalog would be more profitable for the non-Netflix streaming services, not less. It's not like it's hard to track who watched whose IP and distribute the revenue appropriately. The current system benefits Netflix who try to convince people to watch Netflix originals and dump everything else. It's not just a competition for subscribers, it's a competition for screen time too. There's a lot of good content on the other streaming services but it's too fragmented to pay for.

Being a third party distributor for other people’s content has never been profitable. Look no further than money losing Spotify. No company wants to be completely dependent on the whims of its suppliers.

Selling third party commodity digital content is a feature not a product. Apple always said that they use to basically just break even on iTunes music.

I wonder where the idea that Netflix (streaming) should or used to have everything came from.

In the DVD-by-mail days it really did. Even obscure movies made in communist East Germany! Maybe it still does (I like most people who were early Netflix customers, haven't subscribed to the DVD option in nearly a decade).

Friend worked in operations in those days and explained to me how they had 3 levels of storage including "deep" storage. Parallels to data warehousing.

I'm glad I watched my bucket list of movies from Netflix before they shrank the DVD selection. It seems worse now than that of the local public library.

it came from the concept that they sought to replace : in-person rental companies.

Blockbuster didn't only stock Paramount pictures -- and people wouldn't have had much patience for rental groups that worked that way when there were alternatives that didn't -- piracy being the alternative here.

It's well past time for there to be a mechanical license for streaming copyrighted video content. This lock down garbage is just that. Copyright is a joke that provides zero benefit to the public, little benefit to the starving artist, and almost all the benefit to the mega corporations. Sonny Bono is a plague on creativity and his law was even worse.

> Blockbuster didn't only stock Paramount pictures

Keep in mind the this was only because of some monopoly busting decades earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

With Disney owning so much of the production and now entering the distribution/retail side there might be some more anti-trust cases coming.

If the govt was going to nail Disney for anti-trust they wouldn't have let them buy Fox. Disney + was being talked about before the deal was approved.

Blockbuster could stock anything it wanted without the studio’s blessing by just buying DVDs at retail (even though they had special deals with the studio to get reduced prices).

Netflix can only stream what they are allowed to. If you want the convenience of the Blockbuster model there are always rentals from Amazon, Apple, Google Play etc. Yes I realize that some movies aren’t available for rent.

you're right. netflix never had a comprehensive selection of movies or tv to stream. it seems to have even less now, which must be disappointing for subscribers (I canceled my subscription years ago so I'm just going off what I hear).

they used to (and still do AFAIK) have a pretty good selection of DVDs to have mailed though. I think people hoped that eventually the streaming offerings would come to be as broad as the mail-order selection, which doesn't seem unreasonable from the perspective of 2009 but obviously isn't happening today. there's also the fact that music streaming services have mostly succeeded at offering a very wide selection of music to their customers (even free accounts!).

frankly I don't know enough about the music, tv, and movie industries to tell you why it turned out this way, but to the layman it does seem like a perplexing "shut up and take my money" situation. if a service launched with a really good catalog that could at least match the convenience and quality of torrents, I would be willing to pay quite a hefty monthly fee. I have very little interest in paying for five different streaming services that will still inevitably exclude a couple of my favorite shows and movies.

It had all the DVDs, and for a while the catalog really was expanding into major titles and releases. Everyone assumed that eventually the DVD catalog would be entirely available digitally, but that never happened because of greed.

> 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.

You can get pretty much any TV shows or movies on iTunes or Google Play.

For sure you won't be able to access every TV shows or movies for 15$ a month... that's just absurd.

I watch Stranger Things and The Office re-runs on business trips. Once The Office is gone I'll be gone as well.

I agree multiple services is crazy & inconvenient. that isn't an excuse to do something illegal.

Remember the good old days of Netflix when you could rent quality movies on DVDs in addition to streaming? Quality has been going down for years now. I'm intermittently subbed but less and less frequently. Oh well.

and this was after 5 years of hearing your friends tell you the same thing right

I honestly don't see how you came to this conclusion yesterday instead of several years ago and consciously chose to not share an account or ignore netflix completely