I can’t imagine why this company has any organizational or management problems right now. Absolutely no idea as to why they’re burning cash and turning to random websites to shake $500m out of the company.
The three CEO situation was supposed to be temporary to get them to a buyout. The buyouts fell through and Paramount is now in a pretty terrible position.
People are going to think you’re just salty about the general state of TV software but I’ll back you up that Paramount’s software is uniquely bad - the worst of any of the major streaming services.
They offer their service for free on Delta flights, but when I tried it on a US-domestic flight I had to restart a single episode of Star Trek about 5 times because it would cut out with an error saying I was in Canada and couldn't watch the show there.
If you're going to use airplanes as a marketing technique, you probably should be relatively confident that your geolocation system isn't going to go haywire when someone is using airplane wifi and trample all over those prospective customers.
The bigger secret is just to self host. Super easy and Plex/Unraid is the way for everyone upset at the changing content landscape
Personally, with family who earns living from entertainment industry, I try to subscribe to some services… but I also download it and just stream locally. People get paid, but in 20 years I still have taken care of my needs.
It isn't as easy as it appears, partly because media formats evolve. As device output quality increases, there's a desire to get the source up as well.
That means old libraries start to contain a jumble of formats and encodings. The maintenance of this can be a pain.
I noticed this first with Apple TV+ where some films were getting provided in HD or HD/3D. If you have to chose between their perfect audio and video or whatever you have in your library its probably going to be what they offer.
I suspect that Apple (as an example) is using media quality and its features, (spatial audio, their immersive video) in part to prop up people wanting to pay for streaming content. It has to not only be more convenient to stream, but consistently beat the socks off what's easily available via torrenting.
Torrent networks and media players might catch up to start including this stuff and making playback as easy as streaming services' native video players (again I am focusing on Apple TV, particularly Apple TV app on Vision Pro as an example) but as far as I can see its not there yet.
I don't think we're looking at only audio and video quality increases but accommodation of variants on 3D, including media that was previously purely 2D reworked for new ways of displaying content with greater perspective that makes viewing more immersive on a deep bench of legacy content.
I built a home server and can just add drives as needed. Right now I have something like 90TB available, with 30 of that free. Every year I probably add another drive. Soon I’ll have to get a disk shelf for further expansion, but that’s part of the hobby!
> I honestly don't understand, do you generally just add media to a larger and larger hard drive and then transfer it every couple years to a new one?
Not much to understand, it's exactly how you're describing, except maybe with the addition of occasionally encrypting a bunch of it and storing it offsite/cloud-based somewhere so that the 3-2-1 backup strategy is in play.
Netflix's premium plan is $23/mo, a 6TB WD Black HDD is $125 on Amazon, meaning roughly every 5 months for the same price of a Netflix premium subscription, I can increase my storage capacity by 6TB, with some minor added cost of needing the space to use that extra drive, and the power usage costs. And at the end of the day, if I stop paying Netflix my access to all that content goes away; As long as I have sufficient backups, that won't happen with my offline media collection.
My secret is to watch Paramount content through the TV app on macOS/iOS/iPadOS/tvOS. The Apple video player is a much better experience than any of the current streaming service apps.
I'm not sure, but I sure am not renewing my subscription either. I stream on a PC, and I have not once been able to watch a Disney+ show at any resolution higher than 720p, despite following all of their troubleshooting steps. They "scan your system and connection to determine the best resolution" (paraphrase), and don't allow you to choose the resolution. After talking to their support half a dozen times and escalating my request, I have seen no improvement. I'm convinced it's deliberate.
Of course it’s deliberate. Streaming high quality content is expensive and there is very little incentive for them to allow that given their main draw isn’t the streaming service, but the unique content library they have.
Most streaming services through web browsers do not allow streaming greater than 720p unless you install a separate desktop app with heavy DRM protection. They do not want people ripping the 4K feed for piracy. I wish there was a way to emulate the hardware decryption on streaming devices
Very clever. Keep the highest quality files out of the hands of those grubby pirates. Then the customers will have no choice but to subscribe so they can watch the content in 720p.
That certainly makes sense. But Disney+ has a desktop app, and I tried downloading and using that, but still never got resolution greater than 720p. I wish they would at least fix their app so PC users could stream in HD without feeling the need to rely on piracy.
It’s been mostly fine for me but a couple of weeks ago the Disney+ app on my AppleTV got into a crazy state of crashing and immediately restarting over and over. I think the issue was with a DRM related handshake but eventually I had to reboot the device by physically removing power because nothing else could get it out of the loop.
I don't know which app GP is specifically referring to, but on Apple TV
1. Open the app
2. Go to a show
3. Wait for the little preview of the show to start playing
4. Click the "Watch Now" button
5. Enjoy hearing both the audio of the little preview and the audio of the actual show playing on top of each other until you force quit the app.
It doesn't happen every time, and I'm not sure exactly what has to be done to get it in this state. But it's happened to me 4 or 5 times.
2. It has a splash screen but continues loading long after the splash screen ends.
3. The UI thread and data fetch thread are the same thread.
4. If you want to jump to an old season in a show with 20+ seasons, you have to scroll season-by-season to get there. Every season loads up every episode before you can move on, taking 2-4 seconds. Thus, it takes 30+ seconds to get from where you start to the season you want to be on.
> People are going to think you’re just salty about the general state of TV software
But your comment doesn't also make this not true.
<rant>
I have a Samsung and the software is not just bad, but it is rather impressive at how bad it is. It frequently registers multiple clicks (so pressing left or right will often move two places), lags on keypresses with upwards of 2 seconds delay, it tries to autodetect hdmi devices for... why knows why (you can press "exit" and be fine or you can try the secret command "power off, mute, vol down, ch down, mute, power on" to disable this because there is no setting in the settings), exiting the settings usually goes back to the TV but 1/3 times it opens the home menu, and a litany of other weird annoyances. Not to mention all the odd "improvements" on by default that no one seems to like and the spying.
Then when we look at the apps, the story seems quite similar. It is as if these products are built by and shipped by people who have never used them (at least regularly).
I think these streaming services have forgotten how and why Spotify killed music piracy. And how for awhile Netflix killed video piracy. It wasn't just that you could get most of your music in a single place (though this is an important factor), but that they also created a __better product__. These streaming services have brought back piracy because 1) crazy licensing and exclusivity agreements for even old shows (seriously? StarGate and Star Trek? Both of which have frequent lack of intro skips) and 2) are pushing out high cost subscriptions that are garbage apps and really only have maybe one or two shows that people actually want (and the general state of dark patterns being common in just our economy). The market has moved and people do not value the price of shows as much as they used to (especially several decades old shows). Netflix was doing fine and could have lived without increasing their subscription costs, even with companies taking shows off the platform.
The truth is that any people have found that pirating doesn't just provide better content, but that it is a better service/interface. It is often easier to download a show off piratebay, load it into jellyfin, than it is to stream it on Netflix. Jellyfin doesn't care if I'm on a linux computer or using firefox and respond by dropping my video quality. Same goes for Popcorntime (though they got seeding issues). My videos don't have to buffer or won't change quality while watching (seems they limit how much you can buffer. Youtube is a big offender of this), and all that. It's just... a better interface. I'd rather buy the subscription, pirate the shows I pay for, and watch them on Jellyfin than use the apps. Because it is a better experience.
I want to remind people that we live in a world where we have both LLMs and systems that can do impressive tasks like hold a conversation with someone AND it is common to have an app on your phone where it appears that the developers are unaware of the sort function. A big part of the issue is that even if you want the higher quality things, it is difficult to send that signal to these companies because often no such products exist and you can't learn about that quality value until you have the thing in your hands (and thus most people make the reasonable decision to choose based on price. Since that's all they have). It doesn't require conspiracy or explicit collusion, but just convergence and signal complexity/degradation. Because if you rely too hard on signals you'll look at them as targets instead of guides and quickly be victim to Goodhart's Law
I can’t imagine why this company has any organizational or management problems right now. Absolutely no idea as to why they’re burning cash and turning to random websites to shake $500m out of the company.