I worked at a used media store 10+ years ago, and I remember worrying about what would happen when everything was conveniently available on good ol’ reliable Netflix, which at the time seemed like the logical thing that everyone would eventually sign up for, and then what would I do?
Fast forward to today, and streaming has certainly changed the market. Huge TV show box sets are almost impossible to sell, though it’s not a totally dead market. DVDs and Blu-rays sell about as well as they ever did, if not better. Maybe everything is on a service somewhere, but most households aren’t going to sign up for every service, so as a result of all the streaming services fighting like dogs for library rights, there’s almost always someone looking to get a cheap, used, physical copy of a movie they can’t get elsewhere.
If anything, I feel more secure about the future of physical media today than I did ten years ago.
What’s wrong with “this show is only available for rent or purchase”? That’s how I grew up 😬 back in the good ol’ days
edit: never mind, I misunderstood
Did you pay a subscription to five different services while also doing that?
no, I didn’t, thank god. I misunderstood the post, will edit my comment
Fun thing I’m now dealing with.
Crunchyroll raised their prices this month and when they did they emailed me a promotion to upgrade to a yearly plan for quite a bit less than normal.
It didn’t work, so I went to their support which is now an ai chat bot. It has to transfer you to a real person for you to get one as far as I can tell. It told me, since I’m subscribed in Google play that’s why it didn’t work, and I can cancel, wait for it expire, then use the promotion to get the deal.
Ok stupid but hey, it’s not working for me now, whatever. I do that, yesterday is when it ended so I go to try it again. Same issue, I talk to the glorious chatbot again and now after describing the issue and confirming a couple of things it offers to get me to an agent. “Son of a bitch”.
So i get to the agent and they review a few things. NOW that the subscription is CANCELED… They can’t FIX THE PROMOTION. But they could have if i didn’t! (I specifically asked that). I’m so GLAD this is customer service now!
Also kinda funny their whole entire purpose is to add subtitles and they were trying to secretly use AI generated translations.
I just use ani-cli.
It was just the ads for me. If I pay for a service, I should be able to watch without commercials. Since that’s not possible, I’ve dropped all the streaming services and just sail the seas now. Saving almost $100 a month.
Add a debris service. Then you are golden.
I pirated Free Solo the other year. Loved it so much I tried to pay for it afterwards. Only on Disney+/National Geographic subscription service.
There’s some great movies/shows out there, which I’m willing to pay for, but to watch them you need to agree to those Terms and Conditions, which I don’t agree too. So… 🏴☠️
You have to be careful what you pay for digitally as well. I once bought a digital copy of a Star wars movie and a physical copy just to see what it was like. I could only watch it on the Cineplex browser/website and they deleted it after a year or two anyways?! What a rip off.
Maybe you can grab a DVD or Blu-ray?
I hate that series are so freaking expensive on disc. It’s cheap enough that you can afford to stream it to me with $5 a month with commercials or OTA for free with commercials where I’m allowed to record it, but now that it’s on a disc, it’s worth $90. That box of 7 disks cost them $10 to make.
Yeah I’ve been using unofficial streaming services for a while now, only issue is the lack of an algorithm.
I more often than not pirate content I pay for just so I don’t have to watch ads too.
The tech and entertainment industries have slowly eroded any and all moral arguments against piracy.
Streaming and digital distribution have led to situations where we no longer own the media we buy. We could buy a licence to access an app, song, show or movie and then have our access revoked at any time for any reason, and maybe we’ll get a refund if we’re lucky…
Landmining terms of service with clauses banning class action lawsuits and imposing forced arbitration have become increasingly common and is further eroding our consumer rights so if a company does fuck us financially, we’re SOL.
Then we have companies like Nintendo that have litigated hard against emulators, ROM sites and third-party flash carts which have given access to old games that Nintendo otherwise have little interest in making available on modern hardware - in some cases bankrupting people like Gary Bowser for life with seven-figure judgements in the process.
We now have a substantial risk of more shows, games, songs, movies and other forms of media becoming lost because of this.
But the biggest kick in the teeth has come from the AI industry.
Hosting pirated streams of PPV events or sports matches locked behind expensive cable channels, or even selling modded Fire Sticks that enable piracy can earn you significant prison time and a massive fine. Yet training LLMs on copyrighted works without the rightsholders’ knowledge, consent or compensation is apparently perfectly fine and not landing people like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg behind bars?
Been thinking about sailing the seas again as well as buying physical medium and ripping it to digital for a personal collection. These streaming services keep increasing the prices while offering less.
Conveniently AI is now stealing all the hard drives. Where are we supposed to store our torrents?
Time to dust off ye olde DVD burner…
They’ll likely run out of money soonish.
Oh they’re not paying with money. They’re paying with promises and moon farts
if/when AI ever feels a pinch in funding, they’ll just get subsidized by government (i.e., our money), because fascism loves AI surveillance and data harvesting
Reminds me when I tried to watch anime legit. Checked if crunchyroll had what I wanted then paid up. Except crunchyroll has that anime but in another region, why not tell me that before? Since then I’ve been sailing the seven seas without any remorse.
Also, jellyfin is better than any streaming service and it’s not even close.
Yeah but how do you make the jellyfin interface not ass?
The interfaces are a bit basic, sure, but everything seems to be 2 clicks away at most, and the design language is pretty clear… What’s your issues exactly?
I sometimes wish for a bit more variety in the android TV interface (maybe a large “recently added” carousel that also shows short descriptions, or something), but I’ve never had anyone have any issues navigating and using the UI.
Boring, but functional.
Actually no I do actually have a real complaint. Not having compact lists without tiles that don’t have labels.
A user should be able to open a folder or sub-library or section, and see many things and glean information from that without relying on missing scraped covers or FUCK scrolling text. Big labels where you can only see like ten characters and it has to scroll to see the entire thing makes me want to actually rage even just thinking about it. Or like in jellyfin, only seeing ONE text title (that you’re selecting) at a time. Jesus fucking Christ. It’s like whoever designed the interface was just trying to copy Plex or Netflix. God. I didn’t think you could design things worse than Plex, yet… There it is.
These designs rely on all of the same deeply flawed and limited principles: list of scrolling tiles of pictures and you click on one and it shows you details. Like come on. That’s how people’s brains work when they want to watch a movie? Give me some genre tags or era tags or searches based on related stuff. The actors/directors type stuff is awesome - more of that. Or like give me lists by studio or curated top lists that editors or other users make. “In 1999, these were the top grossing movies in theaters” or “all movies that inspired gta vice city” or “the Arnold extended universe” or “all the Ghibli movies”. Stuff like that. Stuff how people ACTUALLY think. That data is out there.
Like. This is piracy, too, not Netflix. We can actually have good lists that aren’t limited by licence, or limited even by what is currently available. We can have pages and lists of actual just suggestions or like “uncollected” because in this day and age, you can literally just go get it.
\Rant
You can change the library view to a list
I think the modern, standard media server interface is fine. It checks the boxes, it has tags, and it has pictures. For casual movie and live action series, this is absolutely fine.
But, imagine, for a moment, that a person downloads fansubbed anime, sometimes multiple versions from different groups. Some hardsubbed, some softsubbed. Maybe you have an old dvd source version and a modern 1080p bluray version. Maybe a fansub version and then a Funimation version and then a laserdisc version.
Then, imagine you want to see the related things and make sure to watch them in order https://anidb.net/anime/4046/relation/graph
This is a little esoteric and fringe case at that. But I think if you’re going to design an index and databaser with details and scraping, it should work for pirated things too, while keeping track of the meta release info, too.
Like I want to know who subbed it, what the source is, the details of the source, etc.
Someone tried to watch Inuyasha recently, and what a clusterfuck of revisionism and weird edits and stuff. The best version they liked is like 240p, and has iffy subs and was released in 2002. But it has all the original music, commercial spots, and the translations, while grammatically not great, are way more accurate because the translator didn’t try to change the personality of the characters, so it’s more authentic and accurate.
Also, the pack acquired seems to be of a bunch of different groups since, for whatever reason, nobody has all of the original raws and contiguously released all of it.
Considering all of this, the designs of all of the major interfaces and databases totally go out the window, and a user is once again reduced to using basically a file browser and player, and getting metadata manually from websites like IMDb.
I’m well aware this is absolutely not popular, even in anime circles. Which is why I can’t truly complain in any capacity and my opinion is essentially invalid. But, I still want it. I still wish there was a better way. And, while I’m in a tiny minority, here, I’m sure there are other people like me.
I use this theme https://github.com/lscambo13/ElegantFin
I’m glad that works for you, but I hate that. Thank you very much for your response, though.
You can make your own if you know how to fuck with css
Alternatively bc I agree that jellyfin clients are weak you can just use kodi as a client, which also looks horrendous by default, but has 20+ years of themes
I minimise the time spent in that interface and launch whatever I wanna see as fast as possible. I assume you mean the androidTV interface right? The web and android interface is decent.
The *arr stack truly is fully automatic luxury gay space communism!
I’m more pissed about shows you can’t watch or buy.
if you aren’t selling I can’t pay for it.
Making your IP available to purchase somewhere, somehow should be a requirement for maintaining copyright and trademark protection. Use it or lose it.
Can’t claim you’re losing money from lost sales if you’re not even attempting to sell it in the first place!
(Needs to be a bit more thought out than my half-baked plan, though. Because, otherwise, every IP owner who wants to park something without offering it for sale will put it up for sale in some obscure place at an extremely high price, just to technically qualify and preserve their copyright.)
Nothing pisses me off more than shows, movies, or games that you literally cannot buy with legitimate means yet every single time someone tries to preserve it they get in trouble with whoever holds the rights. It’s like bro, I am more than willing to pay for it if you’d let me. The reason people are trying to preserve your show, movie, or video game is literally because you won’t let us give you money for it and even when you do let us pay for it you make it worse on purpose to make more money (I.e. ads and subscription tiers)
Often this is because neither streaming nor selling physical media is “worth it” for the parent company. Setting up even a simplified BD release takes tons of money because it’s not as simple as the copyright owner taking ready to use final renditions and burning it to a disk, there’s a whole process that goes into taking the masters and getting the highest possible quality digital copies off them, encoding appropriately for the disks, etc., and that’s not even mentioning the physical production of the disks, cases, booklets, etc., and getting a distribution deal with the right sellers and so on. What seems like a no brainer “you have a product, I want to buy that product, sell me that product” isn’t so simple after all.
Same goes for streaming albeit differently. The rights owner needs to create a streaming compatible release from the master (or sometimes even from the existing physical copy masters!), pay residuals after every playback, AND it has to bring new viewers to the platform for it to be profitable. Adding content just because existing users demand it - users who will 95-99% of the time will still stick with the platform even if they don’t get what they want - is not profitable, as it brings in no extra revenue.
Then there’s licensing. A lot of TV shows and movies are stuck in perpetual licensing hell because even though the trademark and franchise ownership lies with one company, long term rights usage has been sold to third parties as a way to have the IP generate revenue. Foe example, Paramount didn’t start their own streaming for years because all their IP has been sold for 5-7 year terms to e.g. Netflix. Why start a platform if you can literally not put your own product there? Or take HBO - since all Warner Brothers licensing was done in 10 year exclusive blocks with SkyTV, HBO (Go, Max, Plus, etc.) literally couldn’t enter the UK market because ALL the content was licensed out to another company who was promised exclusive rights within the UK for that time period…
I fully agree that going after piracy when you’re not willing to provide your content for legal procurement, is a bit hypocritical, and shouldn’t be a thing.
Setting up even a simplified BD release takes tons of money
You’re triggering my Cyberpunk PTSD…
Fuck em if they don’t want my money
That was anime in Canada for a bit.
That’s still a ton of movies and shows.
