But Is It on Netflix? - Streaming Video Service Thread: Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, YouTube TV, AT+T Watch, Philo, Playstation Vue, HBO Max, HBO Now, Facebook Live and many more

I have Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime. I watch all of these via roku as well as a fair amount of free YouTube and Twitch. I also use roku to play music via Spotify, as the TV plugs straight into my stereo.

The quality of film selections on Netflix seems to have really plummeted lately. Amazon has the best selections of those three.

I'm strongly considering Disney+ because I'm a sucker and want to watch the Star Wars shows.

akm xpost. I set up my netflix in Chile so the fees are 4,990; 5,990; and 8,990clp for the 3 tiers. There is currency fluctuation of course but it's been in the $8 range at least for the last year (I just checked) regardless if I am using it in the US or Europe.

"The quality of film selections on Netflix seems to have really plummeted lately. Amazon has the best selections of those three."

netflix has totally shifted their focus to original programming, only 1/10th of which is worth watching. but it's still so cheap I keep it.

we have netflix, hulu, amazon prime, and recently became members of our local pbs station to access content on the pbs app. I am constantly advocating to my partner that we pause one or all of them, bc we only ever use them to watch one show at a time and will often go months without opening the others. She doesnt want to be burdened with the annoyance of stopping and re-starting multiple subscriptions throughout the year as shows come and go, which is a reasonable thing to find annoying. For movies I almost entirely watch DVDs from netflix.

I'm constantly astonished at how shitty the movie offerings on all of these are, and yet somehow still seem to get worse every year. Was just flipping through hulu yesterday bc I forgot they had movies and the 'classics' tab included Poltergeist II, Mr Mom, and like 25 public domain westerns.

although do people really torrent tv shows and movies that much anymore when you can find a free stream of almost anything?

yes, I do this all the time for TV shows and movies. Wouldn't know where to look for free streams, and besides I value the picture quality and curated content of the big private torrent sites.

a recent streaming experience with hulu, trying to start an episode in the middle:

click episode, cannot seek to middle, 90 seconds of commercials
seek to middle, 90 seconds of commercials
accidentally clicked on another episode while trying to close the app on my fone, 90 seconds of commercials starts
click original episode again, 90 seconds of commercials

This is all too real. Lots of the time if theres a TV show I like that is available on DVD i'll just buy the DVDs, which most of the time can be found used for <$10 on amazon or ebay, specifically to avoid experiences like this.

I mostly just use streaming services for TV shows. WRT movies, it's consistently baffling to me that streaming services should ever pose any real threat to physical media sales. The selection has always been spotty and terrible. The notion of just throwing up my hands and being all 'hey, if it's images moving on a screen, I'll watch whatever (dopey giggle)!' is so loathsome. I'm highly-selective when it comes to the garbage I view, thankuverymuch.

My local library added Kanopy access for cardholders and, while I have underutilized it, it's awesome. Up to ten films per month, pretty interesting selection.

yeah, new york public library opting out of kanopy was understandable given the cost, but a bummer

we can also access iView and SBS On Demand, which are half-decent public broadcaster options.

SBS On Demand alone is an incredible resource of more good films than any human can watch - foreigners can browse titles (but not play anything) at https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/movies

Especially since they recently added a dedicated movie channel.

the only torrent site I know of anymore is 1337x and the selection is crap, venturing into the private tracker thing was awful when I wanted to download more movies, impossible to keep a ratio up and you probably ought to have a seedbox for privacy and blah blah blah
Easier, as it turns out, to just pay $5 to rent from iTunes or something.

I have Netflix and sometimes Mubi (through scribd) and Criterion Channel. Sometimes I split a crave tv account, which is a canadian service that includes HBO. I think these make more sense than cable, where you have to schedule what you want to watch and still have to sit through commercials. but come on people, bundle a bunch of these services together, there's too many right now.

i torrent tv shows that aren't on netflix or hbo. i just found 1337x a few days ago, when all the tbp mirrors went down together.

The biggest private torrent tracker for TV shows doesn't require you to maintain a ratio. I download all my TV from there, everything's properly curated and searchable with various HD and SD options available so no need to go with public trackers. For movies yes the biggest tracker requires you to maintain a ratio but I've never had any difficulty doing that and I don't have a seedbox. Just keep seeding and don't go overboard downloading and you're good.

Y'all mentioned PLEX upthread, its all we use in our household: 2 TVs, 2 playstations, 2 AppleTVs, a 2 TB server, and PLEX is the glue that sorts it all out. Tho we mumblemumblepiratebaymumble.

But without it how could we ever watch all 20 jillion seasons of Law and Order as we have been doing of late.

NZBs all the way...

We pay from Netflix and Prime, I assume I am paying for American Prime because we get American content rather than australian. It’s probably due to the DNS jiggerypokery I do to make BBC iPlayer work, id happily pay for a Brit box service, if australia had one, I guess I could pay for it through US amazon. Kanopy from the library is in there too.

ABC iView and SBS on demand are great but with the absolute worst interfaces. We also love the NHK world app to watch free English language Japanese tv app. I also VPN in to japan to get the free content Fuji on Demand and TBSOD, I’d love be able to pay for Paravi but can’t get it work properly with the VPN.

Top it all off with iTunes purchases and rental. Generally prefer to pay for content if there is a way (including watching adverts) but geographic licensing can make this almost impossible to do.

All watched through Apple TV (although Netflix is watched through the app on the LG smart TV)

i’ve had good luck with r/redditbay ymmv

Just recently ditched Hulu, almost nothing there I want to see. Ones I pay for: Netflix, Amazon, Criterion, Shudder, and Night Flight. The latter was an impulse move after being swept up in a wave of nostalgia. Probably won't renew it.

Anyone got BFI player? My annual sub to Mubi is going to expire soon and thinking of dropping it, unless they come up with a £22.99 deal for the year. Which I suspect was a one off.

https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/search-party-season-3-hbo-max.html
one of many culls from network/cable partnership synergies yet to come no doubt, but TBS is migrating Search Party over as an exclusive to HBO Max
i imagine cable is going to start being a place where things sink or swim and the hits get pulled for streaming services

i think my 6 yr old roku finally crashed fatally -- got a new one for $40

re: Plex. I don't think that's a legitimate competitor. I mean all it does is stream things that you have to download from somewhere to your devices. You may as well just say "I torrent everything I want to watch". It doesn't have working built-in capabilities to stream things directly off the web, to my knowledge; at least the few times I tried to do stuff like that via channels it barely worked.

Probably a conversation for this thread, but the plex + sonarr combo mentioned there gets closer to what you're after, although you're still downloading a local copy first.

apparently people running plex friend sharing networks is a thing, the idea being different people in your circle might rip/torrent/download different things and you browse their selection. I think a friend of a friend is in such a group and I’ve considered talking my way in

oh yeah, plex networks is the BEST but i need to figure out how to set that up. i feel like an ILPLEX network would be fucking awesome.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/23/20697751/piracy-plex-netflix-hulu-streaming-wars

going to have to tidy up my library if we do that

i would maybe like to have this conversation. 77 perhaps?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/apple-launches-house-studio-band-brothers-pacific-follow-up-1246746

Apple is ready for takeoff. The tech giant has handed out a nine-episode order for Masters of the Air, the follow-up drama to HBO's limited series Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Additionally, Apple is officially launching its own internal studio, making the series the first that it will own in-house. Apple's Worldwide Video heads Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht will also oversee the unnamed studio in a move that brings them back to their roots as head of Sony Pictures TV.

Sources say HBO released the series — focused on historian Donald L. Miller's nonfiction book Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany — ages ago and before WarnerMedia became its new corporate parent. The decision, sources say, was based on the price tag for the series, which is said to clock in at an estimated $250 million

Scrolled through the gigantic twitter thread of all the content Disney + is going to have. So much shite, it's kinda unbelievable. And correct me if I'm wrong, but the only new exclusives ready for launch will be a Lady and the Tramp remake and the Star Wars show The Mandalorian, right?

I'd probably pay a monthly fee just for Frozen if I had kids, have to be cheaper than a babysitter, but I'm surprised at how bad it seemed. I mean, it has Star Wars and Marvel, it has popular 'adult' stuff, but hasn't everyone already seen those? It seemed really sparse apart from that.

p sure this is mostly aimed at parents

esp w/ all the old TV shows. price of this plus another streaming service for grownups is wayyyyy cheaper than getting cable just to have nickelodeon and/or the disney channel, in terms of things the kids might beg and scream for.

Yeah. it's probably a bargain for parents, really. Also, once I got to the early nineties I got so many Proustian flashbacks. So many films I remember from ads in the Donald Duck magazine.

Everyone has seen all the Star Wars and Marvel movies but people also watch that shit over and over and over.

the latter part is more accurate than the first

XP ^^Yeah, and as new viewers come along it'll be handy to have all of it in one place in the post-physical media world.

I saw somewhere that Adult Swim's syndication deal for Bob's Burgers is ending soon so Disney can have the exclusive on it, and maybe all the MacFarlane shows too. Simpsons I believe has already been announced to be part of the service.

adults who watch the same movie 10 times are like an alien species to me

You can watch all Star Wars and Marvel movies 10 times, and that's still just half a year of movie watching. Then what do you do? I just have to say, scrolling through all of it, it looked a lot less impressive than I'd thought.

30 Seasons of The Simpsons. (Only maybe 1/3rd of which is watchable, but still...)

Watch one Marvel/SW movie a week and you've covered half the year. Not a ton of people who are going to have D+ as their only streaming service.

Also don't underestimate millennial nostalgia for not just Disney animation, but also live action stuff like Blank Check, Mighty Ducks, and the Lohan movies--not to mention all those Disney TV shows.

If a family member signs up I will 100% borrow their login to watch Darkwing Duck & Duck Tales.

Those shows were such a big part of my childhood! Just seeing them on the twitter thread made me flash back to being six years old and watching tv friday night after soccer practice. But I made it through four episodes of the new version of Ducktails, and I kinda can't imagine going back to watch the old stuff. I'm not sure it works the same way 'Friends' does. I could very well be wrong.

In a few years this thread is going to be like when I asked what 'GPRS connectivity' was, in our old mobile phone thread

In the UK I have:

- Freeview HD (over-the-air broadcasting, comparable to basic cable, approx 50 channels, all the main ones) - £0
- iPlayer (BBC on-demand, comparable to Netflix but just for BBC content) - £0, no ads
- All4 (Channel 4) - £0, zillions of ads
- My5 (Channel 5) - £0, zillions of ads
- iTVPlayer (iTV) - £0, zillions of ads
- Plex

All thru the PS4.

Technically you need a tv licence for iplayer and freeview which would be £150 a year (I know people flout this, I would too in the days of “detection vans” but I get more paranoid the more snoopy and authoritarian-leaning everything is)

Speaking of, if we’re going on that direction it maybe couldn’t hurt to put every non-parent who’s psyched to get this Disney thing on some kind of watchlist

ah wins yes that’s true! i pay the license fee. so about £12/month for all that.

Same as Tracer (dumb TV w/Freeview, smart Blu-ray player w/apps, £13/month UK TV licence) plus:

NowTV (£8.99/mo for Entertainment Pass; got this summer '17 for Twin Peaks, had plans to watch all the Sky Atlantic/Arts content, never did... kept paying for nothing until Chernobyl; worse than that, they sent me a free HD dongle for the TV (laptop streaming is 1280x720) and it never turned up)
Netflix (£8.99/mo for two-screen HD)
Amazon Prime (£6.58/mo, paid yearly; hopelessly underused, aside from Mr Robot and the shopping benefits, until this year's ATP tennis coverage)
Curzon Home Cinema (on demand; haven't actually rented anything in months)

My 5yo Samsung box has scads of apps I've never opened, all of which would need subscriptions. I'm guessing this hardware just won't support some of the newer services, even if I wanted them.

I share the above logins with my ex, and I think she gets a bit more out of it.

disney + is going to have a ton of original content. yes, a lot of it is Marvel, but that's the draw for many.

yeah i think for a lot of these kind of fans the calculation actually will be as simple as "less than $10 to watch The Mandalorian, sure" and then once that's done there'll be something else to keep them on.

yeah, Blue Eye Samurai is so good

Loved the first episode of The Sympathizer, thought they did a great job capturing the tone of the book