Filmstruck / Criterion Channel

put everyone who talks like this out on ice floes for the sake of humanity pic.twitter.com/44BFCSYSSg

— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) October 26, 2018

@ brad - depending on your needs, fandor is like $7/month or something, not a filmstruck-level library but if you watch a few things a month you can think of it like having a video rental place w a reasonably fun indie/foreign/cult section.

kanopy, if your local library has a contract with them, if free and has great collections (difft lineups for different libraries, kind of confusing) but absolutely garbage software/interface.

I love Mubi, but that's obviously not an extensive library

physical media forevah

Ugh. Where will the Criterions play?

Nowhere, for the moment.

@ brad - depending on your needs, fandor is like $7/month or something, not a filmstruck-level library but if you watch a few things a month you can think of it like having a video rental place w a reasonably fun indie/foreign/cult section.

this is great to know, thank you!

Don’t dig Fandor that much, sorry

I don't see the Hulu deal restarting or Netflix shelling money for this library, and Criterion doesn't have the pockets to do a standalone service. They need a big partner and the big partners are drying up.

seems a bad situation-- art film streaming service is not profitable enough for a huge corporation, and a smaller company doesn't have the money to license all these art films

physical media forevah

piracy forevah

This is sad, I was also waiting for it to launch in Canada. Before Filmstruck, Criterion had licensed a big chunk of its library to other streaming services that had a big institutional subscriber bases - libraries, universities - and maybe it'll return to that in the meantime?

Kanopy and AlexanderStreet are two of these which, independently of Criterion/Filmstruck, I'd recommend anyone to check out if they haven't heard of them. If your municipal library is signed up, all you need is an active library card to login and have access on your computer/device.

ymmv on fandor obv - i def haven't used it as much as i might cause it came free with moviepass for some reason, and at the time, moviepass was still usable so obviously i instead went and saw fandor-type movies at the theater, like velvet goldmine. and now it's competing with sinemia and kanopy time i guess. but i've watched some of yr bof-standard silent-film canon (caligari, the general) and some fun cult classic type stuff on it like Death Race 2000 and Dark Star and a bunch of jim henson stop motion shorts from the 60s. not sure where else i would have streamed The Point!. etc.. and sooner or later i'll sit down and take in the careers of bava and argento, some of the herzog classics, etc.

that's just to sketch it out (you can browse the whole catalog on the web w/o subscribing) and by no means does it occupy the same niche as filmstruck. in terms of lineup, kanopy is way closer. but depending on your tastes it might be nice to have.

I've been using Kanopy cuz it's free through my university.

hope criterion comes back to hulu

my household is super bummed about this
even the dogs

so much streaming garbage out there, i will miss u filmstruck
goddamn companies

Mmmmmmmaybe they'll make a deal to be a part of the HBO/Warner/Turner streaming service coming next year, but I'm not holding my breath.

I haven't seen this much collective mourning on my twitter feed since ... well, ever.

a bunch of criterion/janus never left kanopy but it can be elusive, and hard to even really take a head count because there are many titles (not criterion specific) that i can watch through my public library membership but NOT my university one. depending which membership you have toggled to "active," the other titles just don't appear when browsing, but DO still sit in your watchlist, BUT can't be actually played if it turns out they're gone from all your memberships. this is only one of a dozen needlessly clunky features, the worst tho are the consistent roku bugs that mean watching with subtitles on my TV has remained a complete crapshoot for more than a year. you get what you pay for i guess but it'd be cool if libraries would demand these people maintain an easier-to-use product. don't get me started on the pagination woes.

interface on Kanopy has been fine for me on phone, except for clicking to see why a single film was listed as a collection of two, and it starting to play & thus using one of my five-films-a-month (restriction of the Seattle Public Library)

i cringe to imagine clicking page by tedious page through my 17-page watchlist on a phone. also iirc you can't search by terms like "kurosawa" though perhaps that's been fixed

haven't tried to use Kanopy on my phone, but the search function on it's webpage allows a search by director, which is really nice (that is one of my gripes with Netflix). It doesn't feel to me that the interface there is much different from other streaming services. You can add films to your watchlist so they are available when you go in to the app on your tv screen.

I didn't realize that individual libraries make different content available. SFPL I know has the complete Janus Criterion collection as well as many others

17-page watchlist

with only 5 films per month, I have not been that profligate with my watchlisting, admittedly

oh, it's definitely annoying that a 2-minute cartoon counts as as much as a 5.5-hour documentary toward that limit.

I know we have Criterion excluded on our school's Kanopy service because it costs $150 to activate a film for a year, and we only want to pay for films used in classes etc.

sic get a job at the UW, exploit some library privileges

yeah i imagine kanopy must offer a few standard packages to customers, university one maybe heavier on canonical classics for the learning youth, city library one heavier on contemporary foreign/indie/docs for the NPR set? just guessing tho.

ymmv obv but the pagination killlls the browsing for me. like netflix and co have figured this out more or less, just let me scroll thru everything i've put in my queue and see what i'm in the mood for (and if you really wanna blow my mind, let me sort that list by year/name/genre instead of always being most-recently-added). having to click "next page" a dozen times is wack. it's lots of little stuff like that - removing a movie from your watchlist on page 15 bumps you back up to page one. if you're browsing through a genre and click into a movie to get the full details, clicking back out dumps you at the top of the genre. there's no simple "recently added" page so you have to check individual genres and overlapping ad-hoc categories. etc. etc. sorry to rant, it's just a design bummer cause the catalog's amazing and there is never going to be any organized pressure from their customers to refine any of this.

obv the watchlist is longer than whatever i'll get to in a month or a year but i tend to load up lists with whatever on a service looks interesting so that when i sit down to pick something out i can just look at my watchlist.

if Apple's smart they'll grab this up for their new service next year

wish npr or pbs or somesuch had the resources to step into this space, sigh.

Well, guess I won't be signing up to Filmstruck after all :-( I like Mubi but really could do with an alternative.

there's a "recently added" strip right at the top of the Kanopy mobile app, that scrolls and scrolls :)

(and a recently added docos underneath The Criterion Collection)

For all but the very obsessive, the whole "this is why you should own a vast and expensive personal library of movies you'll probably only watch once or twice" line is just bonkers to me.

For all but the very obsessive,

exactly

yeah the real thing to lament is the death of physical-media video stores (or even o.g. DVD-by-mail netflix) which were actually the right medium between owning-forever and never-seeing.

didn't realize that abt the app, might have to install it just to spare myself the clicking around on the web.

Kanopy is awesome, but I agree the interface sucks

not sure what the o.g. version of netflix was but the current dvd-by-mail selection is amazing!

ha i didn't even realize it still existed. i remember an article a couple years ago on how limited and unreliable it'd actually become since they weren't replacing lost/destroyed discs so tons of bog-standard stuff had quietly become not-actually-gettable. but i'm probably fogging up the details.

Netflix DVD-by-mail has more films available than Netflix streaming

For all but the very obsessive, the whole "this is why you should own a vast and expensive personal library of movies you'll probably only watch once or twice" line is just bonkers to me.

think of the question as being "do you want to watch them once"

Criterions have good resell value anyway

xp yes, if you're into classic cinema or world cinema, there's no comparison between netflix DVD and streaming services

I think it was after they did the “directed by Raoul Walsh” collection I thought how dies this exist? This is too good to be true

For the hundred bucks I'll save for not having a year of Filmstruck and its 1000-1200 options, I'll be able to buy 4-5 Criterion home releases (during half-off sales), or half of next month's Bergman box.

losing disc-by-mail maybe the worst thing about moving to Canada tbrr

honestly, cost-proposition wise Netflix and Amazon Prime are still insane for what you get. but they'll never have everything, all the time, hence physical media worth buying and supporting for sure. also, the way history has been, whatever supplants Blu-ray will still publish less titles in the end, the way there were more DVDs than BR, more VHS than DVD..

lame, I was just thinking of signing up for this

Stupid:

Streaming is a scam that conditions consumers to forget the importance and necessity of ownership, to instead subscribe to the profit-maximizing whims of a megacorporation. Continued unabated, it will mutilate the history of film and music. Tech isn’t going to save us.

— Scary Kaleb Horton (@kalebhorton) October 26, 2018

Streaming has stymied piracy better than any other digital model. The mechanism is in place to finally properly pay artists (even if they aren't doing it now) & more accurately track ears/eyeballs.

flappy is a BigTech sock