Filmstruck / Criterion Channel

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

I doubt there will be a successor optical medium to Blu-ray that gets any kind of home market penetration, though considering the sorry state of America's crumbling infrastructure/broadband capacity maybe it'll wind up that we all just start buying movies on flash memory (NB this is way too expensive)

lol I don't even have Netflix! Not into streaming video because the quality is so shit (in my area at least - Comcast is the only option). But I have Apple Music and I love it, and still buy records.

i've grumbled at flappy before for Big Tech sanguinity but i believe their positions are sincerely-held and non-sock

fortunately everyone will be drownded before the Blurays degrade

I generally hate streaming services of all music/film/TV because they often can't provide what I actually want to watch/hear.

lol wait i think i just got flappy mixed up with flopson again

"the importance and necessity of ownership" pretty sure there's a fugazi song about this

fortunately we have the NY liberries, Brad

anyway libraries are really important imo xp

i only buy important shit like Rossellini and Sternberg boxes

the importance and necessity of ownership

such weird icky ethical bullshit surrounding owning/collecting movies, something almost no one did before the 1980s.

Yeah theres flopson flappy and flopsy

if they could've they would've

xp

flopson, flappy, and floppentail, surely

streaming is generally fine (individual companies maybe not of course) as long as you don't think of it as an archive--it's really just the new iteration of broadcast TV

a key difference though: it's not regulated nearly as much

so nothing good is ever on when you want it to be?
i am not a fan of streaming because you have to purchase access to the service AND have reliable internet in order to use the service. even people in major metropolitan areas don't have access to reliable streaming. AND the catalog is never full of what i want to see so it's just like a crapshoot where all you get is crap...maybe.

that's another reason I can't get on board (yet) - shit disappearing and cycling in and out = DUD

so you need three things -- electricity (fine, we all need this), high speed internet service (not everyone has this) and purchased access to the service providing the media. it relies on three levels of access and even then you have to like what they are serving up. which...when it comes to netflix, no.

i try to avoid owning movies (and books), i have enough

i borrow

xp
yes very good points about worse access than broadcast, I was thinking more just in terms of quality and the arbitrariness of what's discoverable

my students look startled whenever I slip out that I still get Netflix DVDs.

They're doing a project requiring an analysis of M and four other good films made in subsequent decades (most recent: BPM). I sent them to Kanopy because, as I wrote earlier, it's free through the uni library, but I almost listed Filmstruck as an option. With the email volume I get, it was a rare smart move on my part.

the importance and necessity of ownership would make more sense in the context of iTunes purchased movies disappearing when rights change

everytime the viewing medium changes, we lose more films.

i love explaining to students why we are watching a DVD instead of streaming. in addition to the unreliable internet service at my school, usually their favorite reason for doing it is that no one can see you watching a DVD -- like when we watched The Murder of Fred Hampton. they could see the value of privacy.

I've heard great things about Kanopy, don't know about their lousy interface but seems like the best option now.

re:disappearing titles. reminds me a bit of the ebook publishers I deal at work. Even though it's not my money it appalls me that they sell these expensive electronic titles and then drop them from their platform without notice, and you have to figure it out yourself. And then when you complain you just get some tech speak about purging content to upgrade for a better user experience!

my library's Kanopy catalogue is easily fewer than 100 items, and probably 90% are contemporary documentaries

LL: that's genuinely good to hear that your students care about data privacy

everytime the viewing medium changes, we lose more films.

I really wish people understood this, it drives me crazy how cavalier (or just ignorant) people are about it

yeah it's awful. do yall know Rite Aid sells blu rays for like $4 new? not a bad selection tbh

xxp ah didn't know Kanopy's library was regional

Kanopy is good but definitely limited compared to Filmstruck. You can only watch a certain number of things per month, for example.

there's a video store opening up here v soon & the line I've heard the most and the line that KILLS me is "can't you find every movie ever made online?" No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

the store is also functioning as a physical media archive, registered as a nonprofit, will have a membership model instead of individual rental charges, etc. wish every city could have this - and lord knows it was hard enough here, they've been "coming soon" for months but they've finally painted the storefront & will open next week I think

is that an Alamo thing?

Alamo just took over the library of the last major video store in SF and I'm curious what their going to do with it

nah, co-owned & run by Eric Hatch, I think most of you have seen him on twitter. but here's the facade:

Our facade design is up at @BeyondVideo_!!! So pumped for them to open soon! pic.twitter.com/hvP5t1AeRb

— Post Typography (@posttypography) October 26, 2018

haha that's dope