One of the things that I will miss about physical medium is the permanence of the data. A famous movie from 2006 had a racist joke. I remember it very clearly because of an argument at the time with my friends watching it.
In 2021, I bought the movie on google. I looked for clips, but I couldn't find a copy of that racist joke. Its as if it never happened. No public mentions of editing the movie or clip to be more "in-line" with today's environment.
While its not bad in this instance, its just a comedian trying to protect their image. The possibilities in the future are not fun.
This goes back to radio edits, https://genius.com/Zager-and-evans-mr-turnkey-lyrics has the line "Mister Turnkey, I forced that girl in Wichita Falls" but the version I have is "Mister Turnkey, there's been a rape in Wichita Falls"
I'm sure this would've been happening in the past too with books having editions. Streaming just moves towards consumption sticking to the latest editions. Like you say, not really a bad thing, but where it goes we'll see
I have no problem with the edits. Artists are allowed to bowdlerize their own works. Consumers should have the choice to edit their own copies to make the same edits - I fully supported "Cleanflicks"[1] attempts to sell edited "Family Friendly" versions of movies - Clearly labeled.
What really scares me is the inability to tell when an edit has been made. We're being gaslight by the media companies, erasing history.
At the rate that Suno, Sora, etc are advancing, there won't even be a deliberate editorial act to report on. All streaming media content could pass through a newspeak software layer for JIT censorship that propagates the values of whoever owns the service.
At some point, all communications (movies, shows, email, text, live voice and videoconferencing) will also go through JIT AI management.
What we see, hear, think, and feel about the world, ourselves, and other people will be managed and guided by whoever (government, corporations) ends up controlling the technology.
Combine this with the continued fragmentation of social groups and personal interactions - families, relationships, workplaces.
It’s what made me drop Hulu/Prime and start pirating and buying (usually second hand) physical media for a lot of my content again.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia which actively lampshades all of the themes being censored now has so many episodes missing from streaming services it’s almost one per season. And they’re some of the best episodes!
>> It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia which actively lampshades all of the themes being censored now has so many episodes missing from streaming services it’s almost one per season. And they’re some of the best episodes!
I thought this was untrue so I checked. On UK Netflix there are at least 5 missing episodes and there's no indication they're missing. They're unavailable to purchase on iTunes too (although unlike Netflix, it numbers the episodes correctly so it's clear there are missing episodes). Appalling. I didn't think I would ever return to physical media for video content but...this is making me seriously consider it.
Edit: As an example of why this stuff shouldn't be censored, I'll explain my recent experience with NYPD Blue. The full thing (uncensored, I think) is available on Disney+. In the first few seasons, I was horrified at the racism. But, it served as an illustration of something that was shown on primetime TV in a specific time period. Personally I wouldn't have thought this type of content would have been broadcast in the early 90's and it was a good reminder of how far we've come. It's the same when watching old British comedies. There are lots of jokes that serve as a good reminder that things have changed for the better, even if it doesn't always feel like that. We shouldn't be erasing history.
When the Betty White is being censored for blackface, which wasn't blackface, it was obvious we are in trouble. It's modern book burning, just less dramatic without the pyres.
Amazon Prime had the series and removed the episode, but has since dropped the series. Which is the other annoying thing about streaming services, they keep dropping shows often unannounced.
Even at the current stage I find it bad enough. Even famous series like Friends get edited and don't match what you remember. You are looking for this or that scene and get confused - maybe it was your imagination and it's never happened? So I keep the original copies for this precise reason. (And, to be honest, the vector space of possibly politically incorrect utterances seems to increase year by year, so this phenomenon is likely to increase, too.)
* If a Blu-ray of a film or TV show has excised or modified scenes for whatever reason, and the original isn't also made available (whether on a different "theatrical cut" release, or as a different cut on the same disc), the entire original version immediately goes into public domain.
* If NBC posts Saturday Night Live skits on YouTube that have removed "problematic" scenes without explaining the differences—a diff file, basically—the entire original skit loses copyright protection.
TV shows with carefully selected music to fit the scene take a hit when the licenses expire. Streaming services serve the current version with substitute and often inferior selections.
I'd love to hear about a physical medium that can reliably store data for decades. All of the ones I'm aware of lose data within years; so much for permanence.
As physical media has been replaced with digital I've come to miss those walls filled with books, videos, and records. Stores (and homes) seem much more sanitised without them. You could tell a lot about a person from a glance at the various media items displayed in their home. Given there are a lot of people who buy vinyl records that don't own a record player, it seems this feeling is common.
I always joke that I'm from an in-between generation in that I'm quite digital but still attached to stuff... I do genuinely cherish the bad AVI rips of the Simpsons and X-Files I got off Pirate Bay in 2008.
That and also the physicality of the process of playing that media. Opening a file or a stream just doesn't feel the same as taking a cassette or a disc out of its box and inserting it into the player. Vinyl records take that aspect to the extreme because the songs themselves are visible on the surface of the record and you yourself put the needle next to the song you want to play.
In addition to that, the physical experience works almost always. In the digital world, you might have a connection problem with your router, Spotify app (replace with your app of choice) freezes and so on. The reliability is what I miss most.
I think that there might be rose tinted spectacles in use here.
Tapes (both audio and video) wore out over time and could get chewed up.
CDs and Vinyl records could get scratched or could crack.
I can recall spending a long time trying to sort out problems with CDs or VHS in the 1990s or 2000s, but can't think of a time where Spotify didn't work for longer than a few seconds.
Most of all they got lost. My family had an entire spindle for lost DVDs, that we'd set the cases down somewhere and couldn't find where. When we did find those cases, we usually just replaced one DVD on the spindle with another that was misfiled in the discovered case.
I think this still exists, as the items that filled the space the books took. Eg the younger D&D folks I know fill their bookshelves with minis and action figures instead of adventure guides.
It does seem diminished, though I wonder how much of that is being converted to digital and how much is “the average person is too poor for a personal library now”.
I have fiber internet at my apartment with a mesh network, and I've found myself missing physical media a bit more lately. Inevitably at some point while watching any 4K media. The buffering will fail or speeds just simply drop? and I start getting visibly lower resolution, this really kills the immersion for me.
Maybe I just don't have the right combination of devices, and/or I absolutely need a wired connection. Regardless, I could not stop thinking how having physical media would avoid these drops.
Unless you have a Sony Smart TV. I bought one a few years ago and the ethernet port is a 100 Mb. To stream from Sony's own movie service, they tell you to use WiFi:
> 7: The Pure Stream™ feature requires an Internet speed of at least 43 Mbps. To enjoy at the highest speed of 80 Mbps, you need an Internet speed of 115 Mbps or faster. Ethernet (wired LAN) connections are limited to 100 Mbps due to the TV's product specifications. Therefore, to enjoy 80 Mbps with Pure Stream™ functionality, you need to connect to a Wi-Fi router that supports IEEE 802.11 ac/n (wireless LAN).
Why I would want to connect a malvertisement tracker siphoning partyhouse to my network and subsequently the internet is beyond me, but whatever floats thy boat.
Because almost 100% of the time that is the only way that you can get legitimate 4K ultra high definition high dynamic range content over streaming services. They won't give it to you over your web browser on your PC. Doesn't matter what operating system you run. It's got to be a set top box or a smart TV.
Depending on who you ask, requirements per 4K UHD stream are about 25-30Mb/s. This is not a number that any kind of modern wifi should have difficulty keeping up with. I have absolutely no problems with 4K UHD streaming over wifi; mixture of Wifi 6 and 6E throughout. In fact, Wifi 6E is usually faster than wired GigE.
I routinely cap out at ~10MB/s over 5GHz Wifi 6 (wireless AX). This obviously depends on your hardware and environment, but needless to say I always just connect good old copper if I need speed.
Also: Do not trust those "<four digits> mbps over wifi!" claims on marketing, they're all worthless horseshit. The numbers are derived from ideal conditions you would never find in the real world.
I agree that those "AX9000" marketing numbers are fake.
>This obviously depends on your hardware and environment
This is the key point. If you have:
A high link rate client.
A high link rate access point.
Line of sight between the two, same room.
A low utilization and interference channel.
No one else heavily using your Wi-Fi.
Non-bad drivers for Wi-Fi.
Then TCP throughput of about 1/2 to 2/3 link rate is possible. 1200 Mbps link rate yields 600-700 Mbps speed tests. Some applications have small TCP windows so their throughput drops on 5 ms latency wireless versus <1 ms wired.
Yes if you plug you always get 920 Mbps throughput.
I mean, I literally see 1.2Gb/s over Wifi 6E from my MacBook Air M3 to my NAS, which is more than I get over wired GigE. So that's not marketing, that's (very-micro) real-world benchmarking.
I do live in a house on a 1.5 acre parcel, so I'm not getting much congestion on the Wifi bands. Even so, I would regularly get 400Mb/s on Wifi 6 in our condo in NY where you could see 30 or more networks.
I do nightly backups of my critical machines to a central server, some are connected wirelessly. The server is obviously hard wired.
Whereas the wired ones upload their backups at full gigabit speed (~100MB/s including overhead), the wireless ones only ever upload at ~10MB/s. I might see it go up to ~30MB/s if I'm lucky, but we're talking pigs flying over blue moons.
The wireless machines range from "one wall away" to "other side of the bloody house", but they're all the same. Even if I get one one sitting right next to the router it won't do more than ~10MB/s. I'm also located in the middle of nowhere in terms of EMI, so the air is clear.
Wireless is bullshit. If you need speed, just run copper and save yourself the grief. You only use wireless when the convenience of not running copper and/or being mobile trumps the lack of speed and reliability.
Eh, storing and arranging physical media is a pain, as is dealing with scratches.
I find it roughly equal as things go.
The buffering thing genuinely confuses me. I get why it happens at a technical level, but the failure mode is odd. None of the content is live, just buffer the next 5 or 10 minutes to disk and have the player read from the disk buffer.
That should never buffer unless the network is degraded for a long while.
The full solution would be to just let people cache the entire video and watch directly from disk, but I believe that’s intolerable to the IP folks.
I remember when YouTube switched from it's original method of streaming to DASH. The old method was to basically pick a file and buffer up to N time in advance (I think it was based on the media length).
But the original DASH implementation was very aggressive about keeping a minimal buffer size and downgrading quality at the slightest hiccup. I was also on a not particularly great internet connection at the time, so I used to pause 720p at the start and let it buffer enough for uninterrupted playback, but YouTube's changes meant that just buffered like 15s and then shifted down to 360p. There were add-ons to force dash off to mitigate the problem but iirc YouTube was starting to make higher qualities dash exclusive.
Clearly someone at YouTube was optimising to reduce time-to-play and buffering but in a typical metrics driven approach, excluded the possibility that for some videos these were less bad problems than 360p videos. At that time I was watching a lot of let's plays and programming tutorials and most of the people were uploading content recorded and intended for 720p or 1080p, so unreadable text because of quality downgrades was a big problem for me at that time.
Nowadays I just brute force it by having comically excessive amounts of internet (2gbps ftth) so YouTube randomly deciding garbage quality is much rarer, but it still happens sometimes.
I'm so happy someone has explained this, because it's a problem that has bothered me for years and I always assumed it was an issue on my end. It's incredibly annoying when you can't make out what's happening in a video, set a higher bitrate then pause to wait for it to download, and it just freezes a couple seconds past the current point, which ends up making the whole video unwatchable.
I don't know what kind of internet these Google engineers are working with, but for people on shared wifi, or in dense urban areas where there is a lot of interference, or tethering to a 4G phone, or sitting on a train, or a mountain, or using a VPN, or living in a country where the government messes with the traffic, it just isn't realistic to expect users to have a fat pipe that never drops out.
>YouTube's changes meant that just buffered like 15s and then shifted down to 360p.
If you're using the web player and manually set the quality, it should never downgrade the quality during playback. If your connection is too slow it'll just pause while it tries to buffer
Is this still true in the age of the smart TV? I’ve never looked but always presumed they had essentially the guts of a crappy Android phone with the radio transceivers replaced.
They get apps and updates now so I would’ve assumed some semi-reliable persistent storage. This really doesn’t even need to be persistent; resetting on reboot would be perfectly fine.
I’ve no doubt they would struggle to cache “real” 4K, but at the bitrate most of this 4K stuff is sent at, 1 GB of cache should be at least 5 minutes. Netflix recommends at least 15 Mbps for 4K streaming. Even doubled to 30Mbps, that’s ~4MB/s, or about 256 seconds of content cached per GB.
I don't miss physical media. Streaming works fine from a technical perspective. What I DO miss is the huge supply of films from all eras, forgotten gems, B-movies, etc.
In my part of the world we had Lovefilm where I got rentals delivered by post. I guess this was the same kind of service Netflix had in the US. The number of titles were just incredible. The number of films I can access today is just a tiny fraction of that. That really is a shame.
I do miss it a bit. Something about the scarcity made it more special. Also, the ceremony of going to the video store, browsing the shelves, and bringing it home. Same applies to music for me, but maybe even more so. I know I’m wearing rose-colored glasses in a lot of ways, but im okay with it.
A lot of commentaries were crap but I really enjoyed some of them and, in a streaming world (whether subscription or a la carte), it really doesn't make sense to devote any resources at all to making them for the handful of people who buy DVDs or even own a DVD player.
I enjoy physical media but not the finding space for it part. Somehow stuff accumulates over time and if you've got 100 DVDs it is a lot of space that you may not actively be using. That being said, I don't have a huge living space so that would contribute.
Get really surprised now, and realize that people actually live that way.
What was stated was literally true and has nothing related to the interpretation your filters create.
If you cannot see that the original statement was literally true, your world model does need expansion (should you be interested about grasping reality, and you should).
The library selection in Omaha, Nebraska is definitely lacking in both old films and foreign films. They have a handful of these titles, but I am always looking for stuff they don't have.
Blockbuster of course was even worse in that department though (and RedBox is essentially worthless).
For foreign films, you might check out your local university. I've found many of the foreign language departments have a fairly decent dvd/blu-ray library that students can check out. I know alumni usually have access to the libraries too, and if you aren't either, I've found some will work with local libraries for inter-library loans.
DVDs are great. The only downside is the obnoxious trailers and loading screens they make you sit through. Often I can start playing a movie on Netflix faster than when I possess a physical copy of that media. Which is crazy when you think about it.
I live in Bristol, so I'm not far from 20th Century Flicks (featured in the article).
They have some things I'd like to rent (and that are hard to find elsewhere), but ultimately I'm still put off by the prospect of having to pay late fees!
Inquiring minds want to know: does their sign take advantage of the FLICKS/FUCKS ambiguity with the right font, and if so is this wordplay on 20th Century Fox?
Rental stores were great, except for the late fees. Many local rentals had good collections of older movies and TV series. They are simply non-existent in the streaming world.
Some folks in here complaining about late fees but Scarecrow has them beat! Some media there you have to put a large deposit to rent - and it's got late fees too! Love that place.
All of the movies, none of the bullshit of streaming. I watch about two to three movies a week, that’s all my TV time. Two weekend trips a month to MM takes care of all my video needs. I guess I’m missing out on streaming specific content, but I don’t care.
In 2021, I bought the movie on google. I looked for clips, but I couldn't find a copy of that racist joke. Its as if it never happened. No public mentions of editing the movie or clip to be more "in-line" with today's environment.
While its not bad in this instance, its just a comedian trying to protect their image. The possibilities in the future are not fun.