The other things I did recently: 1) paused Google YTTV because NBA season was over 2) canceled Netflix because I never watch it

I've been watching content (some of it very old, like The Larry Sanders Show) on HBO Max, but the app on Roku is *SO HORRIBLE* I'd rather pirate content and watch it on PLeX.

The Amazon app/UI is *HORRIBLE*, too. Like multiple seasons are separate items? WTF. I'll download series I have access to on Amazon just to avoid that app.

Not only that but I've even seen the seasons presented in no order whatsoever: i.e Season 2 followed by Season 8. It is nonsensical.

Fun fact: previously it tried to cooperate with the content owners and removed content by request, so the UX was considerably worse. But then, someone successfully litigated to block them 'forever' in Russia, so... They restored all prevoiusly removed content and now it has almost everything I ever wanted. Great win!

The VPN jumping lunacy bothers me. I moved countries - great so I can't use Disney+? I get it, but that now means I have to download (your new) content because you won't actually let me buy your content, directly from you. For the first couple of months I continued to pay for the service. Eventually I decided that if you don't want me as a customer, I don't feel bad about downloading it. Sad really.

The only reasonable option is to pirate.

That became worse in recent years when titles on digital distribution platforms e.g. Steam had music removed due to expiring licenses. This meant a game you had already downloaded and installed would be downgraded unless you were quick enough to stop the automatic updates for it.

Zero control over playback speed is the deal killer for me.

And, no qualms of conscience there at all?

And I pay for Plex.

https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/stat/annual/2021 If you flip thru the years at least the top movies in 2018 have more downloads than the top movies in 2021. I think that can somewhat safely answer your questions.

EDIT: WRONG because as a comment points out below older movies also might just have been downloaded more over time.

From this site, it doesn't look like their was much of an uptick in top downloaded movies from 2019 to 2020. And in general torrenting has been growing less popular.

However, the numbers on this site in general don't sanity check very well for me. For example, the End Game Avengers movie, which was incredibly popular, was only downloaded: 2,890 times in 2019? That doesn't seem high enough to me.

So yeah, not 2,890. Think millions.

This makes far more sense, I wonder why their numbers are so bad.

It's nothing like the old days where we had to wait several weeks to watch Game of Thrones legally, though.

I don't have the exact numbers on hand, but from memory it was something that around 40% of us were doing back in 2013, had dropped to around 15-20% by 2018-2019, and is now at just above 20%.

Then I tried to set them up on the iPad.

There was about 5-10 specific shows they wanted to watch, what I found was that they were literally spread across more than 5 services, with one show each. Not a single one of them had 2 of the shows they wanted to watch.

They were already set up with Foxtel and had been using it for a couple of years, they watched shows on it regularly and knew how to do everything up to hitting the 'cast' button.

So I set them up with the other services, bummed an Amazon account off a sibling, signed them up to the 3 or 4 free services we have in Australia, think I subbed to one other one or something too. I can't even remember what they all were there was so many. I put the icons all in the same place on their home screen so they knew those apps were all the streaming ones etc etc.

I logged into a few of the accounts a week or so ago and they haven't watched a single thing. Not even on the Foxtel, which they were already using, and now they've stopped using it.

It seems to me like they've just hit a wall of complexity and thrown their hands up and said fuck the whole thing.

And you know what? I'm right there with them. Half way through the set up, trying to do the right thing, I was an inch away from throwing my hands up and saying fuck the whole thing as well. It would be far easier for everyone involved if I just brought a hard drive with new shows around for them every few months.

There was another thread here yesterday where some bloke was going on about how he couldn't understand why people wouldn't just spin up a linux box or something instead of using Discord.

Well, this is it. It took my parents months to get used to using one app, and adding something as simple as another couple of apps to the mix has turned them off the technology entirely.

When you introduce anything other than the absolute most simple UX, you risk losing part of your market entirely. You're not building stuff for other software engineers or other TV network execs or whatever your job title is. Everyone trying to carve out their own piece of the pie is just smashing the pie to bits for everyone else.

When it was just Netflix, piracy was almost dead. Now, it's going to come back, unless content distributors can find some way to work together. That goes for music, TV and games. All 3 ecosystems are running into the exact same problem.

I do this for my family. 3TB external HDDs, each time I see them they give me the old one and I give them a another one freshly topped up (things added/removed based on suggestions/requests).

It's been a smashing hit and they all love it.

We all loved Netflix when it came out and paused doing this for a while, but it wasn't long until the fragmentation and geoblocking led to more requests for certain shows popping up again, and now we all pretty much got rid of all our streaming services and are back to the HDDs.

Right. They need to swallow their pride and realise there needs to be a way to have one interface that shows you all the content you can access from the subset of services you subscribe to, in a searchable way. My Netflix shows, Prime shows and Foxtel shows should show up side-by-side in the interface. They can put a ribbon on it and/or an opening title to tell me who the distributor is.

Purchasable/rentable content can appear in a separate section, and when I can buy content from two or more services I have an account with, present them all and let me choose which one to use.

One of the most annoying scenarios I seem to find myself in all too frequently is trying to get to the episode list for a series. The assumption that most of my services make is that when I click on the series card in the list of shows, the thing I want is to automatically be taken to where I left off. This is fine when it works (although it's a big damn assumption that the app correctly preserved where I left off, and even when it does that often dumps me into the credits for the episode I finished last night). But when I want to see the episode list, I feel like I just have to flail about and curse at the TV until I stumble upon the right sequence of buttons to get to what I want.

That's not even to mention the incredibly disheartening recent changes to the home screen of my (Shield) Android TV, where half the home screen is now taken up with ads for programs I will never watch on services I don't even use.

It does make one rather miss the days of a folder full of AVIs and VLC. I also had a nice Plex setup at one point. Maybe one of these days I'll get off my ass and heed the call of the open seas.

There was a little upkick at the start of the pandemic according to Sandvine, but Sandvine's methodology is not watertight and lots of people staying at home with not much to do seems a more likely culprit than service fragmentation.

You can throw money at directors, and actors, but there are just so many great movies, and most were made by hollywood years ago.

The owners of those great films, started their own streaming service.

But, nowadays it feels like Netflix’s catalog is full of its self made titles(Some of them are great), but less and less “popular” ones that we heard of somewhere and just want to watch.

If I am expected to shuffle around multiple streaming subscriptions, and pay for them individually, it is not that different from the cable TV model that these guys took on against.

Sailing the high seas indeed!

Now, of only there was a way to have a moderated search for all content on all trackers.... Maybe there is one already, and its just that i don't know it?

It has mostly russian-dubbed content, but it usually has original soundtracks, too.

Also, now it is probably better than ever (didn't watch anything for quite a while, so it's a guess), because films are currently released on VOD concurrently with premieres in theatres, and that means that good quality content appears immediately, and not after theatrical window