The first 3 star wars films where important for their era, but most of the later ones are just forgettable sci-fi (for non-discerning fans). Not to mention letting down parts of the canon (e.g. the Solo movie, or "Kylo Ren", a hipster/teenage goth abomination that took Darth Vader's iconic status and pissed all over it).

Marvel too has movie diarrhea, with 1 in 10 movies being anything to write home about (eg. Logan).

I'd vote for less superhero movies and less Star Wars reboots and sequels/prequels, and more original stories. Plus, where's that Foundation series?

I really like the Star Wars universe, but the only good new movie was Rogue One. It worked because it was a completely separate story only loosely tied to the original films.

Personally I love both anthologies, and I love them a lot more than the new trilogy (I love Luke's role, but I have doubts about where the trilogy as a whole is going). I know Solo bombed, but for me it was the movie I'd been waiting 30 years for, and I wasn't disappointed.

That stuff takes balls, and I'm enjoying it a lot.

It's true that superheroes do dominate the current movie landscape maybe a bit too much. Nerds won and now everything has to be SciFi, Fantasy, Horror or Superheroes. I wouldn't object to dialing that back a bit, but only a bit.

There are at least a few of us out there who think the same as you. The one difference is I haven't watched one in the theater in years.

For the Legends storyline, I loved the X-Wings series of books (basically how the Rebels defeated the major parts of the Empire): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BJST00W . My favorite book in the series is The Bacta War, there's a lot of small ship action instead of the movies where huge fleets are the norm.

Also in Legends, try the Thrawn trilogy starting with Heir To The Empire https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004WBXM80/ . It's a good set of books with a real threat to the Rebellion.

As for Disney canon, frankly a lot of the books are very meh at best - many of them are just to set up Disney World/Land Black Spire Outpost land. The only one I would recommend is perhaps the new Thrawn trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1101967021/ - be warned that the second book in the trilogy (Thrawn: Alliances) gets rather slow at times, but the third book (Thrawn: Treason) is actually pretty fun.

Another X-Wings fan! Bacta War was awesome, I must've re-read it like 10 times :-D

(Not to mention that only maybe a quarter of these movies are worth seeking out, the rest are something I’d only ever watch for free on an airplane or something. But that’s just personal taste).

Also: tons of Pixar movies. And I still haven't seen The Lion King and Aladdin. Or pretty much any Disney movie other than Brave.

If it's not your thing, that's fine, but I've got two kids, and Netflix is a bit short on movies for the whole family that are fun for both kids as well as parents. They're great at stuff for just the kids or just the parents, but for the whole family is what Pixar and Disney are good at.

There are many options here. That's one of the upsides of pirating non-DRM media. Storage is stupid cheap and anybody on HN should be able to figure out how to get an arbitrary mp4 file onto an arbitrary screen.

HN users seem to be way out of touch with the average user.

Not to mention it greatly simplifies other matters. If you drop a bunch of movies onto your kids tablet, you no longer have to worry about being away from a cell tower or wifi AP. Furthermore, concerning this very article, there is the matter of too many streaming platforms existing. Maybe you only need Disney because you don't let your kids consume any other brand. But probably more likely, there are numerous desirable movies that are on one streaming platform but not another, or on none at all. And a movie that might be on a platform one year could be gone the next. A harddrive full of movies avoids all of this mess. Subscribe to two or three services a year and you'll be spending a lot more than $8 a month. Maybe it still seems trivial to you with an inflated tech salary, but I know a lot of people who think a single netflix subscription is too expensive so they share an account with other friends/family. This is pretty common.

> HN users seem to be way out of touch with the average user.

I am certainly not out of touch with my own friends and family!

Roku is the most popular streaming device and it only supports H.264 for attached storage and its very picky on what it will support.

The obscure edge-cases are things that HN users might be aware of, but simply aren't a practical concern in practice. DLNA is generally the case where you might run into issues, but a transcoding DLNA server solves that problem.

So now you've added even more complexity and a regular DLNA server/client has what is far from a user friendly interface like Plex.

If you drop a bunch of movies onto your kids tablet, you no longer have to worry about being away from a cell tower or wifi AP. Furthermore,

So now we have a streaming DLNA server, transcoding, bit torrenting, and copying the movie to the device as opposed to paying $8 a month and just click "download" to put it on the device?

A harddrive full of movies avoids all of this mess. Subscribe to two or three services a year and you'll be spending a lot more than $8 a month. Maybe it still seems trivial to you with an inflated tech salary,

And the people not in tech are going to jump through all of the hoops you are suggesting?

How poor do you think the average household in the US is that close to 50% are paying for iOS devices and not going to pay $25 a month for a few streaming services? Do you realize what they are already paying for cable?

I am certainly not out of touch with my own friends and family!

Your friends and family are not a representative sample....

And if my family can do it, I am quite sure your family can too. I think the attitude you're demonstrating here exemplifies a problem with the industry in general these days; giving non-technical people too little credit.

None of this stuff is complicated, but when a technical person such as yourself tells a non-technical person that they're incapable of wrapping their mind around something, it becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy as they're now scared of even trying. And without trying, neither of you will ever learn what their true capabilities are.

Running your own server, finding good torrents, risk getting emails from your ISP or paying for a VPN service, dealing with networking and making sure the correct port is open and then dealing with the crappy upload bandwidth that most Americans have....

If you prefer keeping everything on a thumb drive or your phone's SD card, do that instead.

Most people don't have phones with SD cards and the majority of middle class to upper middle class households in the US have iOS devices...

And if my family can do it, I am quite sure your family can too. I think the attitude you're demonstrating here exemplifies a problem with the industry in general these days; giving non-technical people too little credit.

There are plenty of people that can cook but that doesn't prevent them from eating out. Convenience beats cheap.

None of this stuff is complicated, but when a technical person such as yourself tells a non-technical person that they're incapable of wrapping their mind around something, it becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy as they're now scared of even trying. And without trying, neither of you will ever learn what their true capabilities are

It's not about what people can't do -- it's about what people don't want to do. My wife and I both have cars but when we want to spend a night out and go to downtown from the suburbs we take Uber for the convenience.

And if you define the “middle class to upper class”, by definition you get 50% to 60% (3-5 quintile) of the US - the exact population that streaming products are targeting.

Yes, but the overall market also doesn't jibe with taste, as Zappa would say...

Also, I may have to wait until my smart TV supports it. We never had these kind of problems when we just had cable. (Or did we?)

The Muppet Show seems to be missing, though there's lots of other muppet stuff. Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal are also missing, perhaps because Netflix made a new Dark Crystal show.

But what I’m talking about is if you scroll down this list, 8 of the top 100 are from Disney unless I’m missing a studio name, I’m counting BV and MGM. So those 5 are pretty much all the 2019 blockbusters you’ll get from the service in a few months.

If you're also the sort of person that considers popcorn an integral part of the movie watching experience then the streaming services is almost certainly cheaper even if you only watch those two movies a year.