It made me so thankful for piracy. What an abysmal experience. First of all, I’m on mobile and they make you use the app. There is literally no way to get around it except TOR, no using browser, even on desktop mode, as somone like me who is deaf, it means I can’t have my special accessibility extensions which sucks.
So I get to the app ready to watch my show. Bam Adds! Worse than youtube! It’s like an add every 5-10min that lasts from 5-40s. Who the hell can actually enjoy a movie or a TV show in these conditions?
I was like fine, I’ll download it to watch offline then. Nope, that’s blocked now. So I figured I’d tinker with DNS and see if I could manage to block those adds. That didn’t work.
I’m so glad piracy exists. I see streming services have gone full circle. No better than paying an absurd amount for a TV channel plastered with adds. Urgh. I’ll make sure to stay away from disney restaurants now so they can’t legally kill me since I watched an episode of futurama on their platform.
I’ve been back to the high seas for a while.
Before I get into it, I’ll give an honourable mention to the RIAA/music industry, which is largely just putting all of the music on every platform and letting users choose which one they want to use. This is the way, and I’m happy to pay one service to get access to the stuff I actually want to hear.
Back to video/MPAA. Are you all on crack? I saw this coming back when Netflix was the only licensed media game on the internet… I was subscribed and enjoying some shows, the shows then… Went away, they disappeared. After looking into it, the show I was enjoying was pulled when a copyright was revoked by the publisher, so Netflix no longer had the right to distribute the show.
I saw the writing on the wall. That publisher was going to make their own Netflix competitor with their stuff on it, to try to extort more profit from the streaming stuff. Clearly their c-suite thought that people would be willing to pay for just their content separately from Netflix. I saw that writing and noped right the fuck out. Grabbed my tri-point hat and flag from storage and set sail, and I’ve never looked back.
The copyright holding asshats, ruined internet streaming, because everyone wanted to be their own thing. They splintered the entire online streaming thing into a bunch of disparate platforms all with some subset of the media available via streaming. It’s worse than cable, honestly.
IMO, the only good move that’s happened for streaming (but horrible for so many other reasons) was Disney gobbling up all the other media studios and production companies, then putting all their stuff on one service. There’s a few holdouts, but by and large the two biggest players right now are Netflix (the OG) and Disney (+)… So a bunch of good media ended up on D+, and so it’s kind of “the” streaming service… For better or worse (mostly worse, as OP points out).
I’m still firmly on my ship, sailing the high seas. Unless they go the way of music, and allow all shows on every platform and you pick your platform based on your preferences, I’ll stay on this ship. Thanks.
I haven’t set foot on ‘dry land’ since Napster started.
I made the foolish mistake of thinking things had finally started to make sense when Netflix happened, and I got my hopes up that going legit would be viable.
Oh well