I'm sick of goddamned streaming services

I refused to sign up for CBS on principle because of this. Literally the only shows I'd watch would be Star Trek and the two soaps and only one of those things would be remotely worth the 11.99 a month. And they're completely greedy dicks that refuse to sell Discovery on any other platform, only on fucking Blu Ray that fewer and fewer people own.

Now that Netflix is falling all over itself with "original content" (translation: usually bought from a Scandinavian studio) and offering fewer and fewer classic movies, there's a helluva a lot of stuff for free on YouTube. Watched Hitchcock's Spellbound last night for the first time in decades...

I have Hulu, CBS All Access (for now), and Amazon, but most of the time when I want to watch movies I just use Plex.

I've got them for $5.99 a month without commercials. Once I'm no longer able to wheedle that from them, I'm out.

I'm just about ready to pull the plug on DirecTV and go with YouTubeTV and HBO Now. That'll give me pretty much everything I want at less than half the price of what I'm paying now. I'm waiting until the end of baseball season so I can get the max out of the Extra Innings package. My smart TVs are Samsung which only renders MLB.TV in 30fps. I do have Chromecast, so I can get 60fps from my iPhone, but that's a hassle.

Finding a lot of good stuff on Netflix and Amazon Prime.
I'm not quite ready to pay extra on Prime for Cloak & Dagger, when I'm already paying for Prime, dammit. I do want to see it, tho.

I have Netflix and occasionally restart Hulu for certain shows. I’m definitely getting Disney+ though. I’m a nut for Disney films and them having the Simpsons, Star Wars shows and MCU shows is too tempting.

I’m hoping they add the classic Disneyland episodes and other stuff about building the parks. I’m a theme park geek and obsess over videos like that.

Amazon is increasingly locking their non-Amazon media content for certain regions, so your rational on that front is fairly weak. Netflix has been doing the same. Tighter restrictions have historically lead to higher rates if piracy. If someone has no other method to access content except for piracy, guess what they're going to do?

Exactly. If I'm willing to pay $9 a month for access to my favorite shows, but then I'm locked out because I live in Bumfuckistan and can't see my shows until they come out on DVD, it's not unreasonable to find alternate avenues to watch them. The will is there, but higher levels of greed from a corporation should be met with higher levels of resistance from the customer.

We switched to Netflix, Amazon Prime (already had it anyway), and using a digital terrestrial antenna. It works for us.

Greed is what makes your vids, not altruistism.

Maybe if you had an example.

Here's one of my own. Wife heard about A Discovery of Witches and immediately set about to find it. She made a poor choice buying the season on Google Play for $19 with weekly episode availability. It was all available for binging on the Sundance channel via Amazon for $6.99/mo with 7 days free.

The problem may be too many choices with too many delivery channels. I haven't found being locked out a problem, unless you want the most recent episodes of British TV before they've aired in the US.

Yeah, that is pissing me off. I paid for prime and it said it came with access to all prime videos included for the price, but, now it is you have to pay still more to get the shows you actually want to watch. Fuck that, I already paid them and will now just pirate what they owe me. I sure as shit wasn't going to pay HBO $20 a month just to watch GoTs so that got p2p'd as well.

Put all the shows in one service for $10-$15 per month for absolutely everything on demand and I will buy it. Go beyond that and they can fuck off because the alternative is free.

Star Trek: Discovery.
Available on CBS All Access solely in the United States.
Available on Netflix in a few other countries.
Everyone else? Tough luck, I guess.

That's an easy one.
There's no reason why technology and ease of use is continuously hampered other than that greed.

$7/mo for CBS all access. You must not want to see it very much.

I'd very much like to drive a Porsche. The tech exists. Why can't I. Whyuyyyy sob...

I have CBS All Access. I pay $5.99 a month without commercials because I have threatened to leave 5 times in a row and they keep offering it.
Of course, I live in the United States, where CBS All Access is available. If I lived in Mexico, Germany, Australia, or hundreds of other countries, I wouldn't have access to CBS All Access. How do I pay for a service I can't get?

"I want to buy a porsche."
"You can't. We don't sell Porsches in your country."
"Okay, then I will buy a Porsche in another country, and send it back here."
"You can't. We don't allow Porsches in your country."
"Why? I'm willing to pay for it, and it's not illegal to own here."
"We don't allow Porsches in your country."
"Then I'll build my own Porsche without actually taking one."
"You can't do that, we own the intellectual property rights to Porsche."
"It won't be the original Porsche, it will be a copy of one in every detail."
"You can't do that because by doing that you prevent sales of Porsches, and Porsche loses money."
"How? You don't allow the sale or purchase of Porsches in this country."
"You have to buy a Porsche, or else its stealing."
"I would like to buy a Porsche."
"We don't sell Porsches in your country."

Meanwhile, Steve: "Hey, just buy a Porsche from him! Don't whine if you're not willing to buy one."

Whoever owns the distribution rights in those countries will have it available for viewing. Unless there isn't enough of an audience. I can't help you if there aren't enough fans.

Yeah, I have OTA antennas and a surprising amount of content available.

Which means there was no reason to respond to my initial point, which was lack of availability.

Netflix has distribution for Discovery in 188 countries, including Bumfukistan.

28 countries. Netflix doesn’t have Discovery available in 188 countries. See, there’s this issue where not every country gets the same list of available films and tv shows.

Bumfuckistan doesn’t get Netflix Steve. How will Bumfuckistan get Netflix Steve, if not enough people can convince Netflix to bring it to them?

Source?

Here's mine.

Maybe you would clarify for me: those countries that don't get Netflix, and CBS hasn't signed up a distributor; why they should get Discovery for free? The economics escape me.

Disregarding the poor citizens who don't get to watch Discovery without waiting for the DVD release, what have you missed out on, lately?

Ooh, goal post shift. We're moving away from the issue of geographical blocking to why does it matter anyway?

https://www.finder.com/global-netflix-library-totals
http://unogs.com/video/?v=80126024


How will Bumfuckistan get Star Trek: Discovery, Steve?

I have to agree. I don't mind Netflix because there is so much variety aside from what they produce. Still, Disney is a rare case considering they have a ton of really dedicated fans, and their service would be good to keep the kids quiet if you cut the cord and wanted a kid friendly service. Then they would have to stream their Disney channel properties which I don't know if they are planning.

I don't mean to be rude, but people across the world did not listen when the anime market was whining about not only not getting certain titles, but when we did get certain things like Sailor moon, DBZ, CCS, and other titles they were sanitized by the distributors for the protection of the religious shitbag right and the prudes of the country. (hi @Dayton3 )When they did this they cracked down on fansubbers doing free subtitling because it competed with companies like Time Warner, Saban, and DIC. On top of that companies like Disney bought popular films from places like Ghibli and then to help Disney original titles from having competition from a far superior production kept them out of running for many prestigious awards.

We have been fighting this battle for years and trying to find ways to get money back to the legitimate artists while avoiding the problems with international distribution.

How will the people in bumfuckistan do it? Buy the DVDs or blue rays online, ship them, rip them, and re-encode them in their local format. With today's free products you can chose your subtitle language and default sudio language with a checkmark. Gone are the days of audio synch problems, and even storage space. Even the time required is very little.

In addition to U-verse, I have Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and, for now, CBS's streaming service. I'll only have the last one until I'm done with the newest season of Discovery, then I'll drop it until Season 3 has had its run.

Well yeah, but that's not the issue here. This is about streaming services not offering options for people in countries that don't meet what they consider the acceptable demand level for that film or TV show. People want to pay for these services if they can get what they're looking for out of them, but these services refuse to show these films and TV shows, often due to international copyright issues. So these folks download them. I'm sure as many of them order DVDs when they can, but it would be A LOT cheaper if they could pay a flat $10 a month and get their favorite shows that people two countries over get. So they either use a VPN, or they just pirate them. To Steve, both of these options are unacceptable, and he might even have a problem with people ripping DVDs to their hard drives and transcoding them, I'm not sure.

I was going to drop CBS AA right after DSC, but then my parents found out they had Brady Bunch, Twilight Zone, Lucy, and Perry Mason. Now CBS AA is in the rotation.

I'm pretty sure classic Twilight Zone is on Netflix, at least for now. I'm not sure if I'm interested in watching the new series.

It is, but I dropped Netflix a few months back. I have Amazon Prime, CBS AA, and Hulu. We also have basic cable (the 10 channels plus a few locals for $20 thing). The end result is basic cable, high speed internet (we have Spectrum, as they're the only provider we have anymore being out in the boonies) and 3 streaming services for $90 a month. I don't think that's too bad. Of course, I converted all of my DVDs so we can watch them on Plex. My library of films still outclasses the other services in terms of selection, at least for what we watch. Plus, it's free. The only caveat is I keep the computer on all of the time.

The main way that streaming has affected my viewing habits (other than the fact that I binge-watch nearly everything now, even shows that I DVR from U-verse) is that I buy almost no visual physical media. I used to buy DVDs, then Blu-rays all the time (especially around the holidays) but now I buy very few, mainly things like Trek (when they were still making those movies) and the latest Star Wars release.

It is, except for the 4th season. The 4th season episodes ran for an hour, and were left out of the syndication runs. Since they were an hour long, they would need to be split into two parts or run for an hour. An hour long run would have required the syndication runs to have two half hour episodes back to back, which would have made for a difficult sell. This probably caused licensing issues for NetFlix and Amazon, which is why the hour long episodes are on CBS All Access since they own the rights to the show. You can watch the 4th season on Amazon, but you need to have CBS All Access through Amazon.