One of many, many examples: https://screenrant.com/its-always-sunny-blackface-episodes-m...
Even things like iTunes Music Store which once claimed that all your past purchases are available for download from iCloud forever quietly became untrue when I discovered parts of my music library went missing. Come to find out the record company decided to pull licensing from Apple which made that media forever unavailable. So don't forget your backups..... rule of thumb is that you can never trust any company with your media no matter how much bullshit they sell you.
- Peep Show (Jeremy & Nancy "taboo" breaking episode)
- 30 Rock (Jenna & Tracy "role reversal" episode)
- Community (Chang D&D)
- Always Sunny
In these instances, the character that is doing the "deplorable" act is the villian or idiot. It's not like these shows are promoting those views, they're actually doing the opposite.
It's so bizarre.
Discs are good for ripping then straight to storage (or mailing back to Netflix?) but that's about it.
It would be cool to have a shared database of binaries+commands to recreate scene rips from the discs. Or just following along with someone who knows what they're doing and doesn't go for one-size-fits-all compression.
Yo ho yo ho, back to my old life I go.
[EDIT: yeah, I can't read. Sorry for missing the example that immediately followed. ]
/ignore: Curious, can you provide any examples of this actually happening?
There are other Disney films and WB cartoons with large sequences removed.
It’s also very easy to watch if it’s that important to you to watch racist nonsense. Hell I think internet archive hosts it, they did a while back for sure.
You truly believe that’s the driving force behind the problem? That “wokes” are the primary reason some content is hard to get and/or keeps getting pulled from streaming services?
It’s licensing increasingly becoming the core product and everyone and their mother trying to launch their own streaming services. We’ve been slowly backsliding into this situation for the better part of a decade.
Sometimes I have to go though 4-5 different shows/movies on various streaming networks before I find something worth watching and even then, the shows usually get really bad by season 2-3. I can't imagine how wasteful it would be to have to buy all these bad shows instead of just streaming them.
Recommendations from friends. Reviews by trusted critics. The same ways we've always found other things we like really.
I can't imagine how wasteful it would be to have to buy all these bad shows instead of just streaming them.
I have a significant disc collection of movies and TV shows I enjoy. I have almost nothing I haven't rewatched at least once and enjoyed again and/or lent to friends or family at some point for them to enjoy as well. I don't really know how that happened but I can tell you that almost none of those discs were bought as new releases other than big names that I was already fairly sure I'd enjoy or sequels/spin-offs of things I'd previously enjoyed.
$1-2 to rent though? I'd be all over that. Weirdly, that's the cost to rent a physical disk at Redbox...but an on demand title anywhere is higher than that. Despite a streaming solution being cheaper to distribute, the fact it's more convenient/desirable, I guess, means it costs enough to price it outside of what I want to pay.
This feels like a really inefficient market.
It'd also help a lot if I didn't need a different "app" for every store, with its own player UI. Learning how to use yet another designer's cute "experience" just to do the same thing I used to do with a few buttons on the front of a VCR that were the same for every single movie, isn't my idea of fun.
Price discrimination or price segmentation is the technical name.
If you are selling an identical good which has near zero marginal cost to reproduce, then the way to maximize your profit is to sell it to each person for the maximum they are willing to pay.
Ideally, you want to sell (or rent) the same movie or tv show or song to someone willing to pay $5 for $5, $10 for $10, and $1 for $1.
In practice, it is logistically infeasible to target each and every person’s maximum price, but you can try to target populations as a whole. For example, grocery stores with no discount to people who are willing to pay more, versus giving out paper coupons or online coupons to those willing to spend time to save money.
In media’s case, I am assuming that the media sellers are betting the people willing to buy online are willing to pay more, on average, than people willing to go through all the trouble of renting a physical disk.
At least in my case, it would ring true. If I really wanted to see something, I would not care about paying $5 in the moment on my TV and start watching in seconds, rather than remembering to get and dealing with a disc from a Redbox kiosk for $1. But there are people who would want to save the $4, and so the content sellers are able to get $5 from me and $1 from the person using Redbox (although they are also losing sales from people not willing to buy at $5 online, and not willing to pay $1 at a Redbox, but the bet is that population is smaller than the total of the other populations).
Compare the current digital rental prices to taking yourself to the theater. While the digital rental rate is high, it is less than one ticket for admission. If you buy concessions, it only goes up. If you take someone else, it gets higher. That one digital rental starts to look less steep from this vantage point. That being said, I still don't do the digital rental.
Note you're not just paying the marginal cost, you're also paying for the streaming infrastructure they invested in setting up.
Edit: very old numbers can be found here. https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/03/6400-2/
The cost to build out the infrastructure to stream movies is tremendous.
Netflix overdid it with making everything a serie. It's super annoying, and I simply don' have the energie to start another serie simply because Netflix's analytics say that it's better for engagement that you have use the serie format instead of a simple movie. It has very little to do with the actual story telling.
TV in general is losing viewership to games. A decade ago, the watercooler conversation at work would be "So, what TV shows are you watching?" Now, it's "So, what games have you installed lately?" This may be a big part of Netflix's problem.
There is a VR-movie called Pearl by an ex-Disney director - you basically sit in a passenger seat watching the plot but can turn your head etc.
Take that one step further and be at the table with Michael Corleone and the Police Captain. But what happens if you wonder out into the kitchen and check on the veal. Linearity and emotion get sacrificed. But the techniques games designers find to bring our attention will undoubtedly be useful for journalists and campaigners to highlight real issues, and marketers to highlight crap.
My guess is we either find you cannot get the mass of humanity to focus on one thing, and that news cycles and games will just be sharded - the people who know about and care about this space battle are limited, just like those that care about the fifth series of this tv show or the text of an a to of parliament.
I doubt we shall all have a more curated world - it's hard to imagine any media outlet having the sort of range of power TV stations of the 60s and 70s did. But maybe we can all have a better shared mental model of the world - so what is truly(!) important is perceived important by most people. This might be a bit naive - it if games are simplified models and faithfully represent the world maybe we will learn. Most Sim games generally teach co-operative politics in the end
I can sense it matters. I just don't understand it. I do wonder if i played more games it might help !
There are some good recent sitcoms, but you don't get the same sort of 12 seasons of 22 episodes run.
Stranger Things, The Queens Gambit, Narcos, The Crown, basically all of the rest of them.
A complete list of movies that would be worse as series:
Anything by Michael Bay
If I want to listen to something as common as Kanye or something as obscure as MSTRKRFT, I can do it on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, pretty much anything. And I only need to subscribe to one service.
If I want to watch something as common as ‘Inception’ or as indie as ‘Twin Peaks’, there’s virtually no chance I’d be using the same services.
The experience with video streaming is literally just some of the worst ever in terms of finding content. You pretty much have to just pick whichever one seems the best and pirate whatever else you need, which begs the question of why not to just pirate in the first place. That’s just not the case with music.
17 million listens. I would not call that obscure.
As a matter of fact a lot of truly obscure stuff barely gets to SoundCloud, let alone Spotify.
Here’s - perhaps - a better explanation as to why.
The majority of major music labels - Sony/BMG, Columbia, EMI, etc - have the majority of their music available on the majority of the available streaming services.
This situation is unfortunately worsening on video streaming platforms as every major studio and their brother wants to completely commit to their own service.
It’s even worse as the result of this weird licensing moving around is series and films being removed from services you’d previously subscribed too mainly for those particular shows or films.
The only result of this is value loss and confusion presented to the consumer - as the recent CNN+ disaster shows, along with Netflix’s flailing subscriber count.
The music streaming world is exponentially better. Like - subscribing to a music streaming service is actually worthwhile. Video streaming services decrease in value with every new one that is introduced.
Same with movies. As I've gotten older, I can name about a dozen movies I'd like to watch again. I can afford to buy the next "highest quality release ever" when the time comes.
Before I do that though, I'm going to check into Youtube Music. It's possible what I don't find on Spotify is available there.
Movies, I don't find many are missing from services. Perhaps the movies I loved were less obscure than the music. I don't plan on ripping a single DVD or VHS tape.
I agree. Which is why I like to own my media.
The only way to stop me from pirating the media I like is if you actually let me buy the superior experience I can have as a pirate.
P.S. copyright and IP law in general need severe reform if we want to serve creatives and not executives
Now, though?
I remember looking at the Criterion Collection streaming channel not that long ago and what struck me was just how much of the Criterion Collection was not even available on their streaming channel.
https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Things-Complete-Blu-ray-Orig...
Of course, since CD’s are uncompressed audio, it doesn’t matter if you play them on the most modern sound systems, they’re still going to sound great.
Streaming allows me to find a nice balance between quality and bandwidth, unfortunately while DVD’s are neat for bonus features, the quality unfortunately makes it rather unpalatable on even semi-modern (1080p) TV’s.
Weirdly, almost all of even my much older audio CD’s - stored in the same bin away from heat and moisture - don’t have this issue.
I have to wonder what effect the specifics of the manufacturing process have on how likely a disc is to experience disc rot, as actually even within the SEGA community it’s widely accepted that Saturn discs have an unusually high rate of failure compared to other compact disc collectables.
However - importantly - my original point about quality also applies to backups of these mediums as well - so, assuming any copy of that audio CD has been properly archived and backed up, it will pretty much always be the best quality it can possibly be. Backing up a DVD these days - when there is a majority of the time a superior Blu-Ray or streaming release, is frankly pretty pointless, except for, unusually - the much more abundant amount of special features often found on DVD’s.
I never understood why special features pretty much went the way of the Dodo when Blu-Ray became the standard.
Many Blu-Rays are remasters of the originals as well - so, it’s kinda moot with remasters. My point is with the massive quality difference, and that DVD’s in general will only get less worthwhile as time goes on.
It's possible to make them look a lot better, but you're right that it's a huge amount of work to do so. There's basically nothing out there tagged "DVDRip" that's worth a damn IMO, because almost all encoders (both human and software) treat the DVD like encoding a CD where making the most exact copy of what's on the disc is the goal.
Encoding a DVD for modern screens on the other hand requires some art direction all its own. DVDs have a huge amount of legacy hidden in them, not only in the interlaced NTSC/PAL systems but in Sony's D-1 tape system as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-1_(Sony)
A good modern DVD rip will be:
- Deinterlaced to 60FPS (technically 60000/1001 fields-per-second) using a temporal-smoothing filter like QTGMC. Handbrake will not do this. Almost all DVD rips are 30FPS and just look gross and feel gross from all the lost motion information.
- Cropped to avoid the black bars on the left and right of the D-1 resolution and to make circles into circles instead of slight ovals. This is really noticeable in cartoons with circle-guides for eyes like The Simpsons.
- Stretched to 960x540 (16:9) or 720x540 (4:3) at encode-time with a quality resize filter. This is probably the part nerds have the most internalized opposition to (I sure did) since the raw NTSC DVD res is 720x480 and expanding it feels kind of like encoding a FLAC out of an MP3. All DVDs are anamorphic (704x486 is a 3:2 res, stretched equally for both 16:9 and 4:3 DAR!), so the alternative is that the display performs the stretch in real-time using the container PAR/DAR flags. Most displays do a terrible job.
The vertical 540px is the EDTV resolution and still part of the ATSC spec to this day, technically as 544px with four dead pixel rows on the bottom for 8px block size. I've yet to meet a decoder fail with 4px blocks though so I prefer the panel-accurate res. It pixel-doubles in exact multiples to 1080, 2160, etc, so it looks way better on modern screens.
- Color-corrected from the oldschool D-1 colorspace to the newer HDTV or 4K colorspaces, or at least tagged as such if not converted. This doesn't undo the lossy nature of subsampled chroma but still looks a lot better, especially in the greens. This is another thing that cheap displays are terrible at doing in realtime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._601
- Rip the raster-based DVD subtitles to a modern format like SRT/ASS. I usually use SubtitleEdit and correct the few OCR errors by hand: https://www.nikse.dk/SubtitleEdit/
- Encode AC3 audio to AAC, preferably with something nicer than FAAC. I include all languages because why not. I like FDK-AAC and will use VBR-4 or VBR-5 if I want low-pass or not based on the source waveform: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Fraunhofer_FDK_A...
- MKV container, take the time to fill the container metadata fields, tag audio track languages so the player picks the correct one, attach a `cover.jpg` for Explorer/Finder thumbnail, name all the chapter stops, etc. This is actually grueling some times. My precious metadata.
Totally huge pain. Worth it though for things worth having :)
Now you can say "I can make a digital backup of my DVD". Depending on your jurisdiction you may have the rights to do that. But your own backup of that is unlikely to be durable.
A cloud copy of something on Google, Apple, Amazon or Netflix is essentially forever.
People don't realize what they're effectively asking for is digital rights to something in perpetuity. And you can't really price that realistically.
Streaming services actually far better match what users actually want (in general). There's no issues of storing media or keeping digital copies safe. The limited time you can view something is what makes it economical.
Remember too that most things tend to only ever be watched once. The satisfaction for collection isn't relaly about repeat viewing at for the most part.
Instead I want to watch “The Expanse” and I dont know if it’s a Netflix special or HBO or Hulu or Amazon or what. I logged into three of them and it wasn’t there.
Oh look, it’s on the Pirate Bay. Also, it’s not throttled / forcibly downgraded to 720p or whatever.
I personally possess CDs from the 1980s and vinyl records from as early as the 1940s. Meanwhile I can’t access digital purchases made in the last few years. Perhaps not “forever”, but frankly close enough.
And, there was no concept of temporary when physical media were produced. A completed sale of physical items is legally a permanent condition. That’s why physical items can be resold. Also, physical media did not come with a time-limited license. Again: both sides considered the sale permanent. It was in fact forever.
The point of view in your comment might make logical sense to you today, but it does not reflect the actual history or legal status of physical media. People “don’t realize” these things because they are not actually real.
It's sad that the general public cannot get its shit together and every man jack keep and use his own library.
I know because I'm one of the sad sacks that owns hundreds of original LPs, CDs, VHSs, DVDs, and also has a couple TB of HDD worth of borrowed series, and hasn't touched the damn pile of 'precious' in ages.
"Give me Convenience or Give me Death", as those 1980s punks so neatly summed it up.
I think though there will be some laws passed hopefully that will allow us to own digital content outright in the near future, hopefully in a decentralized way.
I still prefer buying and ripping Blu-Rays though.
And did anyone ever use those UltraViolet codes? I never tried them. What did they even do?
I guess streaming won out because consumers prefer it - I know I do.
DRM. If it's DRM your still don't own anything
This was the idea behind digital rights lockers: UltraViolet, which Disney refused to participate in and which closed down in 2019, and its successor Movies Anywhere, in which Paramount, MGM, and Lions Gate are not participating.
[Old HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19046108]