To return closer to that, is any service yet providing a unified interface to all the streaming catalogs? (In which all titles in all services are in a "flat namespace" in the UI, not first selecting a streaming service in the UI and then browsing within that one service.)
I used to use the DVD service and the films I rented were across a much broader spectrum than is available via streaming subscription, especially considering the recommendation engine on the streaming services seem to be geared towards pushing the shows the service spent the most money on.
It is still possible to find smaller indie films & documentaries online, just other places. Worth noting that membership at your public libraries often gives you access to a streaming service for films, media, ebooks and audio books and these often have a wide range of content.
The closest thing I have found is ReelGood. They let you pick all your services and search, browse, etc. Handles cases where multiple providers have the same content pretty gracefully. Your authentication creds don’t talk to Reelgood, so they’re deeplinking as closely as they can to each provider’s content page. For instance if Yellowstone is streaming on paramount plus and Hulu I’m presented with buttons for each, which will launch on those respective providers. I’ve only ever seen a URL be wrong once, and I use Reelgood almost every day. I also wrote a TamperMonkey script that embeds a show/movie’s rotten tomatoes score on the page to help optimize chances of whether I’ll enjoy it or not. I find this really helpful as opposed to switching between streaming sites or apps.
Not perfect but pretty good. Plex are attempting something similar but I was less impressed when I tried theirs. that was over a year ago, though
Some streaming boxes will do exactly that; both Apple’s and Amazon’s will, and perhaps others. For example, if you search for a movie or TV show on Fire TV or in the Apple TV app (on that box) it’ll show you the title and what services currently have it available. Searching for Stranger Things and House on Apple TV, for example, return links into Netflix or the Prime Video app (where I’ve been watching the latter).
In the US at least, Netflix works for search, but it doesn’t show up in the “continue watching” list. I don’t understand their motivation for that. And it means I often end up forgetting I’m watching a Netflix show because I don’t see “continue” until I end up back in Netflix.
On which one? On Amazon FireTV devices it does link into the Netflix app. It works well enough that to e.g. continue watching series on Netflix I rarely open the Netflix app because they're visible directly in the FireTV interface.
I have the JustWatch app, it's very useful, but as far as I know it is only an index of where to find particular videos? Maybe if you have an Android TV (I don't) and install it then it takes you direct to the service. But, personally you pay for each service individually.
Personally, I would alter copyright to create a "most favoured nation" style payment system.
If you provide works to one distributor then any distributor can pay you that price and have access to the work.
Giving copyright holders monopoly control of if works are sold, and a monopoly to the revenue, but not a monopoly over the route from them to consumers.
Exclusivity would be allowed, let's say 3 years (certainly less than 5, minimum of one).
Same across all media. But then I'd also limit copyright terms to 20 years (same as patents).
I just tells you where a movie, series, etc. is available in your country. It shows streaming, buy and rent options, and the prices where applicable. You still need to go to the service yourself to watch it.
For movies letterboxd does this quite nicely but it's a small part of the service rather than central. But any movie has a 'where to watch' section with links to the movies on berries platforms, if you're subscribed of course. This is powered by a third party service, JustWatch, which might work for you - they do seem to have their own thing, not just an API
Netflix has very little interest in participating in this (to be honest I expect some of the others see it as a temporary arrangement to build share that they will pull out of at a later point too).
They have agreed to do it in a few cases (such as Sky's set-top boxes in the UK), but I imagine that an awful lot of money was required to facilitate that.
For bigger players the gain in traffic from participating is smaller than the loss from people drifting outside of your app to watch something else.
Also from bitter experience, you will find that what is supposed to happen in search when a title is on two different services and which gets priority generally results in such scorched Earth warfare that these arrangements tend to fall apart quite quickly.
Netflix being the only game in town is also cable because that's a monopoly. We called them cable monopolies. You're describing competition, and that's good. Just look at how Netflix has been raising prices and blocking account sharing. They would raise prices even more if you couldn't go "I'll cancel and go to Disney+ instead".
Cable monopolies didn’t actually produce content, they had a distribution monopoly but different cable companies all had HBO etc. The biggest issue most people had with cable was the bundling, they would have a few channels you might like alongside dozens you didn’t but needed to pay for them collectively. And with streaming nothing changed, D+ has 1 or 2 shows I might be interested in, so does Netflix, and Hulu, and etc etc.
Net result spend 100+$ per month to have a decent chance of finding something interesting, rotate subscriptions, or even better just skip them all as crap.
I don’t know why streaming services have so consistently failed to produce good content rather than simply being mildly interesting, but I suspect it relates to how captive their audience is. Shows need to be actively bad before you swap to something else else because it’s all asynchronous. The threshold for success drops from actively engaging to mildly interesting.
I have more streaming subscriptions than are probably justified by the amount I watch, can't be bothered to manage rotating, and buy some a la carte and I still pay probably half of what a cable TV only subscription would cost me. I give up live TV but that was something I rarely watched.
And it's not like cable TV carried everything, including movies, I wanted to watch anyway.
To return closer to that, is any service yet providing a unified interface to all the streaming catalogs? (In which all titles in all services are in a "flat namespace" in the UI, not first selecting a streaming service in the UI and then browsing within that one service.)