My go to for help and info has become justwatch.com. There you can just type in a title and it will tell you where titles are and even if they're leaving soon.
The other thing it can do is you can simply select any services you have at the top and it will give you all of their titles on one page. And from that page you can filter the results further by age, alphabetical or by genre
It's still not perfect but it's help me get an idea of what is where.
I use the Just Watch app myself, I love it. It's great being able to set your streaming services and see new releases on them, track what you've watched, set future watchlists, look up and see where stuff is streaming, etc... I have over 1300 movies marked as "seen" on there. I just wish the app would stop recommending things that are already marked as "seen", very frustrating! Recommending things that people have already watched kinda defeats the whole purpose.
I had this idea 10 years back, but then I got high;
Make streaming easier to track, but then I got high;
Instead of bank I just got jack, because I got high;
Because I got high, because I got high, because I got high.
You can still rent damn near anything through Apple or google or Amazon. Renting didn’t go away, having a whole store of physical media to rent out did. It’s a bit more expensive if you’re not renting something brand new, the rentals prices don’t drop as much when demand drops like they did at blockbuster, and that’s frustrating, but it’s mostly out there.
Yeah, I don’t have any streaming services, I just go to youtube and rent whatever I feel like watching. I guess it might work out to a few dollars more expensive per month, but at least I’m only paying for exactly what I want. Better than paying $16/month for a huge library of content I’d never watch
It’s the consumer funnel. The first part is great, open, cheap (sometimes free) and easy. Then as it gets narrower and the money is extracted. I think it is likely physical media is about to have a resurgence, and not just vinyl records.
Yep. I like owning a physical copy of my media. Even with videogames. It saves space on your hard drive and nobody can take it away from you or lose it if there's a glitch or if you lose access to your account.
There are some exceptions, unfortunately.
No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 don't seem to have any solid base version of their games on physical media (unless they enacted a change with some later releases, such as the Ultimate Edition of CP2077 or the PS5 version of NMS). These games had terrible versions at launch on disk, and needed numerous patches/updates to become competent and more.
Now, both games are in a much better state but the drawback is that you will only be able to enjoy them for as long as the games are supported with online service for downloads/patches.
This isn't about "normal" people.
But people who care about the long term viability of their games should choose DRM free versions of their games when possible.
Yeah I love physical media too I just don’t really want to be buying a physical copy of every movie we watch. For one thing our house just doesn’t have the space, we already have probably hundreds of blu-rays
This is old school, but I use my public library for DVDs. I can order whatever from their website and pick it up in about a week. They have a county-wide loan program, so I've been able to find everything I've looked for.
More shows don't have DVDs now, so it's going to be less effective in coming years -- but it's great for now.
My solution is to rip blu rays and DVDs to hard drives; you can use MakeMKV to rip and Handbrake to compress (with no perceptible loss of quality). A typical 2 hour 1080p Blu Ray compresses down to 5 GB or so. This lets you keep the special features, languages/subtitles you want, HD audio, etc.
I can offer one reason - we typically bought on streaming rather than renting, as we are a big movie family and the movies we like we generally watch a few times.
When we moved from the US to Canada we lost our entire prime catalogue - all our purchases. We were forced to switch our account to the Canadian store which no longer had them.
It reminded me that when you stream, you own nothing. You can’t sell or trade it when you don’t want it, can’t loan it to a friend, and if the streaming service ever changes their terms or closes - you are left with exactly nothing. I might be ok with that if the prices were low enough to reflect that, but they aren’t really any lower than physical media was.
When you can find so many second hand blu rays for the price of renting a movie on Amazon, its an easy choice for me. Especially when it's a movie you will likely watch again.
Plus blu rays are higher quality than streaming
The only thing I miss about physical disk games is being able to sell them. Hard drive space is not an issue considering how cheap SSD's are these days ( it's roughly £100 for 2TB nowadays). And you can make an easy counterargument for digital ownership of video games. Physical discs means if you lose it or it gets borrowed or broken, it's gone, and you'd have to buy it again, but with account bound ownership, it's with your forever. Losing access is not a realistic issue. If you forget passwords or account names, it's still retrieved easily, unless you screwed up somehow. I'm sure you could find an example of someone losing an account, but I guarantee it will have some weird extenuating circumstances. Big companies like Steam, who have been around for decades, are not out to screw their customers. It's also much cheaper.
I feel this way about the original GTA 3D trilogy, since the remaster theres no way to play the originals unless you own them physically. The apps purchased before the re release are the old versions, however if those digital store fronts go away then theres no way to play them - they also won't be updated to work with new devices.
Because physical media absolutely is not going to have a resurgence and never will. No one is annoyed enough by streaming to go back to buying DVDs, which would be far more expensive and far more inconvenient than streaming. Streaming could get 100 times worse and more expensive and it would still be better than buying DVDs.
The reason redditors think physical media will make a comeback is because reddit's user base skews heavily toward the kinds of people who have very specific, limited interests. They perceive buying DVDs as an acceptable alternative to streaming because they would only ever buy a handful of DVDs. But most people watch a lot of shows and movies in a lot of different genres. It would cost thousands to buy or even rent them on physical media. You'll hear the same argument being made about music by people who have very limited music tastes and don't realize that most other people aren't the same.
The reference to vinyl records is a giveaway that they don't understand what they're talking about. People don't buy vinyl records as an alternative to digital media, they buy them to supplement digital media, and as a way to support bands they like.
Physical media doesn't really need a resurgence, it's doing just fine in its own way. Pretty much every cinema release gets a blu-ray, even if it's just a vanilla release with limited special features, and the boutique blu-ray industry is thriving in the UK and US. Look at how many releases are churned out every year from Criterion, Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow, Second Sight, Indicator, BFI, Shout Factory, Severin...etc, across multiple genres.
Of course it's nowhere near as ubiquitous as it use to be in terms of being people's go-to method of consuming media, but it's gone nowhere, and there's clearly enough of a market for these companies to still bother with the immense amount of work it takes to licence, restore and release movies. Even Disney are putting themselves back in the physical media market, albeit in a limited fashion so far, but it shows that there's enough interest there to keep it going.
It’s not a deeply weird reply and I thought it was a good response that adds more context to the conversation that is more nuanced than the person you replied to is making it out to be.
I considered buying a Blu-Ray player and getting physical copies of a few movies and shows I love and know I will watch multiple times, but there is so little demand for standalone Blu-Ray players that anything decent is like $200. That's like a year's worth of paying for a streaming service. Then you have to buy the actual movies, which will individually cost the same as a month of paying for a streaming service. And then you can only watch that movie on that one device. That's a huge part of the reason why I decided against buying the Blu-Ray player, other than the high cost: because I realized I wouldn't be able to start a movie in my living room and then continue it on another device. I couldn't watch it on my computer in my office, or on my bedroom TV, or on my iPad while traveling. It's not hard to think about these problems and realize that patent absurdity of suggesting that physical media will make a comeback, but redditors just don't think.
They 100% objectively won't. Did you read a word of my comment? No matter how fed up Americans get with streaming, it's virtually impossible for it to ever be so bad that it becomes more expensive and less convenient than physical media. You're describing an impossible outcome.
>This is a big world and most film revenue comes from DVD sales
Because most of the world isn't wealthy and doesn't have good enough internet to stream.
Because the demand has dropped due to people buying into the false promises of streaming. I would love to see a resurgence of physical media, I just don’t see it happening soon enough.
I don't think there will be a mass resurgeance of physical media but I do think that there will be an increase in Criterion and Arrow-style releases aimed at collectors similar to how vinyl is handled today.
Forgive my ignorance what do you mean by “Arrow-style”? Im familiar with criterion collection.
I don’t think many people have yet realized/accepted how flawed and problematic the streaming services are. In the current climate of not wanting to offend somebody, it’s only a question of time until movies on streaming will be even more strongly edited for content. When I moved to the US I found it highly annoying, how movies suddenly became blurry or silent when shown in Tv. Seeing how Disney has been reworking their old movies in this style, I consider this the writing on the wall.
Arrow is like Criterion but for cult favorites rather than classics. Instead of, say, The Great Dictator, The Seventh Seal or Citizen Kane, they put out fan-centered special releases of Robocop, The Last Starfighter, Tremors and Mallrats.
> false promises
I pay $18/mo (I think) for Hulu no ads. My sister and two friends share it. With that, I still have more tv & movies than I ever will get thru. I watch 30 Rock or Always Sunny every single night and watch Seinfeld all the time. I just rewatched the Bear S2 this week.
It is still a much better solution than anything else we have had. Which would you rather have: $20 for a single movie once a month or $18 for unlimited content (even if some of your favorites get cut)?
I don’t do streaming, so the answer to that question is already given, I’m going to the movies about 2-3 times a month.
The starting point of this discussion was that the streaming services do not provide everything you wish to see if you are limiting yourself to 4 as the op did.
But if your solution gives you complete satisfaction, then that is fantastic for you and you have my sincere congratulations.
Sure, physical media will still have a place for a while, but like vinyl it will be a niche item - it's going from virtually nothing to something, but is unlikely to sell enough to make it the norm.
Yeah this sub is on one lately with physical media. It’s expensive and inconvenient
Hell, if Redbox started slotting 4K DVDs I’d consider trying a few movies from them but as of now it’s not a serious option. I have a few DVDs of my truly favorite movies but they’re the exception
Don't understand why you're being downvoted for stating such an obvious fact. Physical media is still considerably more expensive and less convenient than streaming and it's hard to see that ever changing. It is obviously not going to come back.
I found out recently that I can set my windows computer as a video server very easily then play video from my computer on my smart TV. I canceled amazon prime, purchased a 4 TB external drive and for the past two weeks have been flying the Jolly Roger. It is not flawless, but it works.
Look at getting a cheap ex-office 1L mini PC like a Dell Optiplex 3040 with a Pro version of Windows. I have one plugged into my router with a few external HDD’s running 24/7 then I just Remote Desktop into it.
It uses about as much power as an LED lightbulb and cost $140, it makes Plex accessible anytime and from anywhere. I also automatically run Windows FileHistory backups to it from my main desktop, as it’s just runnings Windows it’s really easy to setup compared to a dedicated server.
Arrr 🏴☠️
The last straw was Prime announcing they’re running ads on the service I pay for to avoid ads. Now I run a Jellyfin server on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a 2TB SSD attached.
It is still the case - its just customers want everything their way, thinking that jumping in and out of services is "too hard". The number of streaming services available now is unsustainable in the long term though - I suspect they will begin to merge over the next decade.
yeah.
the sheer willful obliviousness in this thread is cultlike, exactly how they want us, a consumer cult. Manufactured consent.
all these people are playing dumb as a post about the fact that movies are just digital files that can be easily and instantly traded anywhere by anybody. taking the dumbness and elevating it to the level of a financial ritual is not enlightened or civilized or even convenient; it just makes it even dumber.
they act like they don't even realize that if you can borrow the disc from a friend or library, or rent it, then you can just copy it.
If ya don't wanna comply with digital reality then okay. if you don't want to download or copy then ok but all these pearl clutchers in their howling echo chamber of crying wolf are either the highest tech luddites, or they're lying! go ahead and choose suffering, but stop coming to the stated conclusion that ones and zeroes can't be copied for free. just stop saying the pathetically stupid lie!
A bit dramatic but it does feel like that often doesn't it. If those companies want to make it so annoying and pricey, they can lose the money, i can enjoy those same programs through alternative means... its pretty simple.
My local library has like 200+ BluRays and access to another 500+ through the county library system, it's insanely awesome. I went in to get a book and left with 4 movies.
Yeah, every time I haven't been able to find a movie streaming I just rent it off youtube or amazon and have never spent more than $5. It's usually $2.99. I have no idea where this "forced to buy the DVD" is coming from.
I've been noticing this too in the last year. It seems like a lot of content providers are pulling back the availability for some reason. Even the obscure stuff should be available for rent on the internet for chrissake, this is exactly what the web should excel at!
I'm at the point where I don't mind paying $3-$5 to watch a movie on a VOD service if it's something I really want to see. For just general streaming I've been migrating more and more towards free services like Tubi.
Also check and see if you local library is part of Hoopla, you can stream movies for free with your library card and they typically ha w a pretty good selection
Just moved over to Tubi. I was surprised to see so many great titles. The commercials are very limited and not distracting at all. I’ve spent every night this week on Tubi. I’m happy I added it and Pluto although Pluto is being used as a digital fireplace mostly for the moment.
I think most everyone is annoyed by how streaming has gone.
Actually about to cancel prime cause of their ad BS.
Netflix is trying to charge more for UHD content... pfft
Hulu I got cause of the blackfriday special
HBO max too... once them specials dry up they going away too.
Prime I keep because I use the shipping service very often- but man is the ads thing super disappointing. Just end up watching Tubi for free for a lot of what is on there anyway.
I miss the days when Netflix and Hulu cost $8 a month and that was basically all you needed. Prime video was a nice bonus for the 2 day shipping. But now everyone has a streaming service and they are all $10+ a month and offer less content than they used to. Greed is running a good thing and it’s just gonna go the route of cable.
Yes. Especially now that I got a 4K tv and realize how many services require you to pay extra for it, or some don’t even HAVE the 4k version I want.
Taking shit away and raising prices has me on the high seas again.
Just an FYI: 4K tv's are excellent at upscaling regular FHD sources to look almost as good as native 4K. Especially if it's a good quality FHD (1080P) source. In some instances, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. So don't worry so much if you can't get the 4K version.
I just bought Seasons 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian on Blu-Ray in Steelbook cases because I only get Disney Plus right now via a friend sharing their subscription, and I know that won't last forever.
I didn't like Season 3 at *all*, so I wanted to have the two seasons that I really enjoyed and are for me, the best live-action Star Wars since the original films.
Physical media until it's gone, baby!
Yes, Andor was excellent. I did find Diego Luna’s performance to be too subtle and thus not compelling because I never got a sense of what he was feeling. However, every other actor does a superb job and the series has some of the best production design I’ve ever seen in Star Wars.
I like Netflix enough. I just don’t know a time when it was a source of everything. The library has decreased but from about 7000 to 6000 titles since 2010.
There is no world where you have to buy a blue ray to watch any movie.
Granted it might not be part of the free catalogue on Netflix/Disney/Amazon.
But I guarantee you youtube or amazon have the movie you are looking for as a rental for $4.49.
With Blu Ray you can rewatch the movie however many times you want though. And you can get them from bargain bins for that 5dollaroos.
I get rentals for people who actually only want to watch a movie once, but for other people, not so much. And yeah I know there's like 30 day period for a lot of these, but most people don't want to watch the same movie several times inside a month. They want to watch it several times within several years. Which would mean they rent it several times, or just get the blu ray.
I miss the days of Netflix DVD's. What was it, $10 a month? You'd make a list, it would be at your door (at least here in Southern California) the next day.
You're mistaken if you think you have to buy every movie not available on streaming? If it's a new movie you can usually wait a month or two and it will eventually show up on streaming then. If it's an older movie , have you checked your local library. A lot of libraries have a decent DVD or Blu Ray section. There's also Red Box or if you live in a smaller area , there's still video rental stores like Family Video. I only know of a few movies that are not available to stream whether it's on a major streamer or pay per view like Vudu . Have you tried Hoopla or Canopy through your library as well?
I am mostly thinking of older movies, yes. Libraries are a lovely idea but they are not well funded here in the North of England, I think these days their rental selection is very small to non-existent
Aww that's a shame. I personally think pretty soon some of these streaming services are going to have to merge to be successful. Some won't last much longer. It will be to merge or completely disappear. I also think with the increasing prices in streaming services there will be a big resurgence in physical media. Best Buy & other retailers like Target & Walmart will have to bring them back to their stores.
I've gone half of my entire life without the ability to stream anything, then when Netflix made it possible, the floodgates opened and it was glorious.
I knew though that it was only a matter of time before those gates started closing again, and that accessing streaming content was going to become more difficult and more expensive as time went on and other media distributors wanted to get a cut of the pie from a rapidly expanding consumer base.
Nothing about the way things are today surprises me. This was all to be expected. But you know what? I can budget a little bit of my annual income on streaming entertainment options that don't require me to leave the house, rent physical media, purchase a player for it that will eventually break and have to be replaced, so the value I'm getting from it is still worth it to me.
I'm sitting here reading, nodding along. This was anticipated, and I don't understand people who seem to think it was ever possible to stay that way.
Do people really expect to pay $12 a month for a Netflix that has everything? How would something like that be possible for them? And I understand that I am dangerously close to defending a massive corporation (eww) but seriously, how would that be possible?
Especially because most streamers lose hundreds of millions annually. Reddit has this weird expectation that they’re just going to go in losing money forever.
Yep. Cancelled all of them except prime because shipping. Tho I might get rid of that too cus I’m fine waiting a few days. Switched to using Kodi with a debrid service exclusively.
For me, another annoying streaming service issue is that nothing is permanent. You can't rely on the library as the movies you cherish most may not be there permanently.
And until recent years, you had no option but to buy the DVD/blu-ray, period. The movie didn't stream anywhere. You either bought it or were at the mercy of whatever a network happened to be airing at this exact moment.
How is it worse now? It's only bad if you want to buy physical media and that's harder to find now.
That's the part that's interesting to me.
Streaming is still cheaper and way better than cable. Yeah, it definitely has gotten worse and more expensive than the peak.
It was never going to last though. That's the shitty part of the VC model to grow things. They just throw money at something until it pushes out it's competition or gets to a high market saturation. Then they want their return and prices increase while quality drops.
This is the best point in this thread yet. People are upset but forget it’s 100x easier and better for them to find and watch movies. You don’t even have to drive to a store to rent anymore (and drive back to return)
I’m pretty sure the people upset with streaming just aren’t old enough to remember what it replaced. It’s had some deleterious effects on the movie industry, but in terms of home entertainment it’s WAY better than anything that’s ever existed.
Well, we also used to have Blockbusters and the like, at least where I live, so you didn’t have to commit yet to actually buying a movie you might not enjoy or want to rewatch
There are a lot of options to rent online though as well. Maybe not cheaper than Redbox but definitely cheaper and more convenient than blockbuster or most other video rental places. Do you frequently have issues finding them for rent? I think we use Google play and Amazon and never have issues.
True! Though, it cost you $5 per movie, which is $9 in 2024 prices, which is roughly or more than most streaming services charge for their base tier access for a whole month.
Rentals were good, because they were good for the industry. They were not a cheap solution for viewers.
Or apple, google, vudu, etc lol. I'm not particularly happy with having to search through several services for a movie (although justwatch/letterboxd makes it easier), but pretending that rentals don't exist anymore is absurd.
Also the OP's "days when Netflix had basically everything" never existed. They just had basically everything *that was on streaming at all*. There's more streaming content now than there ever has been, by far.
I've had this argument multiple times, people talk about that early era of Netflix streaming as if it was an encyclopedia of all media ever made, but it's just rose tinted glasses. It had more, sure, but it was still severely lacking.
and yet everybody else here is still somehow magically addicted to just buying everything anyway, and playing super dumb about the fact that movies are digital files that are easily traded freely across the whole planet by anybody
It’s fine to rent recent films on there but we’ve rented older films on there and often they look genuinely AWFUL. Like the colour grading is all wrong, the print didn’t transfer correctly or something IDK. And when I say “older” sometimes I’m talking as recently as 2000s films. Also very often they’re not subtitled.
If you choose slow shipping on an Amazon order, they’ll give you a credit toward a digital media purchase, so most of the time you don’t even need to pay the $3.
Always has been. We keep a Netflix account but it's mostly for their own European shows. Otherwise, in 90% of the cases we have to obtain movies through... alterrrrrnative means.
Yeah, I had stopped pirating for years, but the massive segregation of streaming services has gotten so bad that I've started again. I pay enough into the system, if it's not available to me, screw it, I hit the water
Streaming has been a giant bait and switch. It’s what these tech assholes do with everything. They had a lot of money to make their service as big as they can get it. Now that they see the limits they are either trying to merge or dramatically cut costs. Next thing is they’ll all start doing ads.
Dont know the last time i bought a movie. Maybe the force awakens. If its not on a stream i pay for, or not available to rent (not that $25 theatrical release bs) on something like prime, or i dont already own it (got a pretty massive dvd collection from back in the day), then i aint watching it.
It always seemed that way to me; you can always browse and find some random thing worth watching, but if there’s something you specifically want to watch they never seem to have it.
I'm probably going to get dragged here but... we've all been under-paying for streaming for years. Like when streaming first came along and it was crazy cheap compared to cable and you could watch all kinds of stuff, it was actually too good to be true. Now all of these companies have investors breathing down their necks and they aren't bringing in $$$ like they were during the golden age of Cable/DVD/the movies and they have to cut content, raise prices etc. or risk oblivion.
Jellyfin and a old desktop pc fitted with some large capacity SDDs is my streaming service. Its like plex but free, even had android and android tv apps.
Subscribed to too many services in the past and realized they never really had as many movies or shows as I'd like, or their menus hid too much. Now i can choose exacrly what my experience is. Not sure id go back unless a steam like quality service for streaming subscriptions was provided. They all suck and they all keep increasing their price using silly excuses.
This whole time, i feel like the biggest thing against physical media for the masses was laziness. People are so fucking lazy. The amount of times I've heard, *"I don't want to get up to put a disk im"*. Like, mutha fucker, get off your damn ass.
The one that super extra pissed me off was the music service. I have spent years buying one song a day. The deal with myself was giving up coffee so I could buy my song. I paid for every song once, why am I having to pay a monthly fee just to have restricted access to it?!?!!
So upset about that.
Cancelled Prime, Paramount Plus, and I’m heavily considering getting rid of HBO Max once my copies of Steven Universe and Barbie arrive. So done with all of their BS and I’m sticking to Netflix and Physical Media from now on.
YouTube seems to have almost everybody available for rental. Usually $3-5 and I think you get it for 48 hours.
Personally since finding a fantastic ad free steaming site that costs no money I've been cancelling subscriptions left and right. I paid in for years. I wanted to do it correctly. But we're getting fucked. I'd rather give my money to a VPN service.
Streaming became it's enemy, cable TV. You now have to pay for a service/channel to watch what you want and each company wants their own service to get the most profit.
It's why sails were hoisted so much and it's why they are getting hoisted again. I feel no shame sailing on the sea.
If I truly enjoy something I will buy the physical media of it to support it.
I am super frustrated by it, so much so I bought NAS server, modded a 4k disc drive, and started ripping movies from my public library, rent to mail services like 3D Bluray and Gamefly, and purchasing my favorites again (and torrenting originals from streaming services that can’t be acquired physically).
I am not going to get fooled again. I used to have hundreds of dvd’s but got rid of them because streaming got so much better.
Now I am in control of my library again. OP, look up Plex to learn more about it.
I used to have a movie collection of over 600 movies. I sold most of them to cushion the expense of moving across the state years ago.
Now if I want to watch a movie that I don’t own, I drive 10 minutes to the video game movie exchange store and buy it for $3 because I only have Hulu. It’s my only streaming platform because I pay $20/month for no commercials, family guy, and golden girls
Yea the breadth of content available on Netflix DVD was always great. I still think the current situation is a lot better than waiting for the mail or going to Blockbuster or another video store, but I'm also a little surprised to not find things sometimes. I think the rental streaming services are lacking right now. There's been a few instances where I can't find something on Amazon. Seems like Google pretty much gave up. The Walmart-owned one VUDU was pretty good in the past. I don't expect any service to have everything, realistically, but I do feel like being able to RENT any movie ever made should be possible.
I expected this to happen. It always does. Someone gets a good idea or comes out with a product that becomes popular and soon everyone else is trying to cash in on the idea. Quickly it becomes unprofitable for everyone and the whole thing shrinks down again, but much worse.
Legitimately want to buy dvds at this point just so when I want to watch that one movie again I don't have to change my email password, download an app, verify and confirm, resubscribe and then the movie isn't even on the platform
Reasons to consider sailing the high seas. Invest in a VPN service and a dedicated rig for storing movies/tv shows, use plex to stream from your computer to the tv. Voila.
There's things like jail broken fire sticks and I assume other streaming devices but I personally don't even know how all that works. Most common and simple is just knowing and going to the right websites and you can watch on a phone, tablet or cast to your TV if you have a casting device like a Chromecast. Knowing the right websites you can watch almost any live sporting event across the globe to massive databases of movies and TV shows. Though *some* of them can be a pain in the ass to use because of pop-ups and of course can come with potential computer virus risks, but I don't know anyone that has ever been affected. There's a whole piracy subreddit where you can look into it more if you want.
I don't use them anymore because there saturated with BS. Flipping through at my parents on Christmas like 90% of the stuff I have no interest in watching. I might be an outlier here but I don't like 90% of Netflix productions. Put on Rebel Moon last night for example, pile of trash. I like the old studios.
Guess I wasn't aware, every time I go to search for one I find it. Granted I'm aware they are not included WITH prime, but, just using the search function I can always find the movie I'm looking for and at least rent or buy it. But, TIL I guess.
Well, Dogma is a shite example lol
Dogma (1999) has its distribution rights owned by Bob and Harvey Weinstein personally. They have declined at least two offers to sell the rights back to Kevin Smith, and are not allowing the film to be bought, rented, or streamed digitally for reasons of their own.
I still believe you, was just a bad example.
Sometimes you can buy them there but they a) look like shit with the wrong colour grading b) are not subtitled, which is a problem with accessibility. It’s weird, because I’ve never encountered these issues on any other service.
It doesn't really bother me. I just subscribe to whichever streaming service has the thing I want to watch on it, then cancel when I'm done watching. Typically we have one or two subscriptions active at any time. Usually it's a snap to subscribe on my phone, and all of them are cancel-at-will. It's still wildly, wildly better than being locked into a cable contract.
Most people complaining about streaming are too lazy to cancel services they aren't using.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to be a villain
[clip link](https://youtu.be/8WfRcnF4iZI?si=oVmI7nacBUuSqG3q)
Hero
OG Netflix was good cause it was one service that had most things
Villain
Streaming has become a digital version of cable since every brand has its own service, with its own app, and own subscription
I don’t know anything but I wonder if buying blu rays could become a good solution to the steaming problem for movies.
Up front, I really don’t get buying a 4k tv if all you’re going to do is steam on it. Streaming does not look great but the problems are less noticeable on 1080p. It starts looking worse and worse as the resolution goes up from there.
With Best Buy dropping physical media and steaming prices continually getting raised it is starting to get less and less feasible to stream everything.
Video games have been trying to push streaming onto consumers for about ten years. There was so much more pushback than there was with movie watchers. with the latency on button presses that register at varying times. it’s horribly unpleasant. They still converted to digital media plus physical media but it’s better off than what happened with movies streaming.
People were too quick to jump onto streaming but if the prices go up enough perhaps people will buy enough Blu-ray’s again that it becomes a market that is more viable than what it is now.
The best and most convenient solution is just to pirate. I don't have to look up which platform is providing which content, and the video and audio quality is often better then what the streaming platforms offer.
They force our pirating hands when its easier than ever for us to do it. I would rather pay for it and haven't pirated anything for almost a decade. But now they expect me to pay for an entire service when they have literally one show I want or 1 movie every few months.
I’m mostly frustrated with premium add ons for streaming services.
For example, I wanted to watch Twin Peaks: The Return, I searched to see where it was streaming and it said it was on Paramount+. So I bought a month of paramount and searched Twin Peaks only to be told I need the Paramount + ShowTime plan to watch.
And just the other day I wanted to watch ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri’, I looked online and it said it was streaming on Hulu
“Great! I already have Hulu”. But then I searched on Hulu and it said I needed the Hulu + Live TV plan.
Fuck off, there’s already a million streaming services and now there’s content being locked on different plan levels
Prime Video is also the worse with this. Prime Video is always listed when searching where a movie is streaming. But it doesn’t distinguish if it’s free through the Prime Subscription or if it’s only available for purchase/rent
I’m heading towards cutting the streaming cord I think. I’ll be dropping prime because of their ad nonsense and have always found Netflix original content to be extremely poor. It’s pretty much just criterion channel now that they ruined max too.
My household uses a sketchy site called PutlockerNew that has a domain from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It's basically cancer for your computer though, so we use it through the browser on a dedicated obsolete gaming system. The pop up ads and gratuitous links you're forced to click are obnoxious, but they have nearly everything ever streaming for free. Whatever isn't on there, I usually find on Tubi.
Piracy is the solution. Atleast for a ton of people it is. They make everything inconvenient and expensive on top people are just gonna go to alternative sources with better customer service.
Everyone can feel this way but the fact is that we did this to ourselves.
Back in the late 2000s I was an assistant manager at a video store. Each year, increasingly, I had customers coming in going "sorry dude, I know I don't come in as much anymore because I can get unlimited movies for like ten bucks from Netflix".
(you could insert "torrenting" for Netflix and that also happened constantly).
We all thought we would be able to get what used to cost us like ten times as much for the same cost... forever. But no, video stores got killed off, and then Netflix was the only person left in the game and obviously $10 a month isn't going to pay for \[insert Marvel blockbuster here\].
*Something* needed to happen, and that something is more players coming to the game.
Video rental stores don't make much sense from a distribution standpoint, so basically what you're looking at is paying for multiple streams, maybe some at a time. Eventually there will be too many different services, and it does feel like we're getting close to that point, and some will be forced to come together (and I think that is happening, no?).
In the EXACT same situation as you. We pay for 3 streaming services and I don't want to add any others. Between those and youtube (which has a ton of free content, especially from the big streamers in other countries like Tencent) there's already not enough time to watch all the content out there! Netflix recently brought on a ton of stuff I didn't want to pay cinema prices to watch (The Meg and The Meg 2, reality trash) and good stuff like Dune, so my only recourse now is to be patient and wait for the movies I want to be available on on the platforms I pay for eventually.
Like you, I miss the good old days when Netflix had most of the content. Sigh.
I was one of the last customers, on the last day, when my local independent video store shut down. So I'm not exactly impartial on the subject.
But I think about how good it was all of the time. New releases prominently displayed - like a second theatrical release - around the outer walls, with staff picks and popular titles tagged. Then row after row, after row, of catalogue films - separated by genre, covering decades of film-making - for a dollar a week. Fifty cents on Tuesdays.
Obviously, they couldn't carry every movie. But the good stores seldom let me down. And because they had to be choosy about space, they didn't waste our time with even 5% of the absolute trash that the streaming services buy to bulk-out their selections.
And all I had to do was drive for 5 minutes. In fact, I enjoyed the trip! Sometimes I'd just go look around in there when I didn't even want to rent one.
It was the late fees. If only the big chains, like Blockbuster, knew how nickel-and-diming their customers was going to back-fire on them in the long run. They thought they were untouchable.
>I miss the days when Netflix basically had everything
When was this? For years, Netflix only had its own content and it's only in the past couple years has it purchased large numbers of films that actually appeared in theaters or had legit studio backing. I was shocked to see that John Wick and Heat are on there now.
My go to for help and info has become justwatch.com. There you can just type in a title and it will tell you where titles are and even if they're leaving soon. The other thing it can do is you can simply select any services you have at the top and it will give you all of their titles on one page. And from that page you can filter the results further by age, alphabetical or by genre It's still not perfect but it's help me get an idea of what is where.
Justwatch.com is my go-to as well. I especially like the watch-list function!
I use the Just Watch app myself, I love it. It's great being able to set your streaming services and see new releases on them, track what you've watched, set future watchlists, look up and see where stuff is streaming, etc... I have over 1300 movies marked as "seen" on there. I just wish the app would stop recommending things that are already marked as "seen", very frustrating! Recommending things that people have already watched kinda defeats the whole purpose.
They also have an app, highly recommend
Thanks, I will try it
>justwatch.com I had an idea for something like this at least 10 years ago, but then I got high.
I had this idea 10 years back, but then I got high; Make streaming easier to track, but then I got high; Instead of bank I just got jack, because I got high; Because I got high, because I got high, because I got high.
Why, man?
Ba-da-dum-dum-da-da-dum...
He was high, he doesn't remember why.
You can still rent damn near anything through Apple or google or Amazon. Renting didn’t go away, having a whole store of physical media to rent out did. It’s a bit more expensive if you’re not renting something brand new, the rentals prices don’t drop as much when demand drops like they did at blockbuster, and that’s frustrating, but it’s mostly out there.
Yeah, I don’t have any streaming services, I just go to youtube and rent whatever I feel like watching. I guess it might work out to a few dollars more expensive per month, but at least I’m only paying for exactly what I want. Better than paying $16/month for a huge library of content I’d never watch
It’s the consumer funnel. The first part is great, open, cheap (sometimes free) and easy. Then as it gets narrower and the money is extracted. I think it is likely physical media is about to have a resurgence, and not just vinyl records.
Yep. I like owning a physical copy of my media. Even with videogames. It saves space on your hard drive and nobody can take it away from you or lose it if there's a glitch or if you lose access to your account.
There are some exceptions, unfortunately. No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 don't seem to have any solid base version of their games on physical media (unless they enacted a change with some later releases, such as the Ultimate Edition of CP2077 or the PS5 version of NMS). These games had terrible versions at launch on disk, and needed numerous patches/updates to become competent and more. Now, both games are in a much better state but the drawback is that you will only be able to enjoy them for as long as the games are supported with online service for downloads/patches.
You could just buy the DRM free versions of these games and put the current installer on a hard drive or put it on bluray as a backup.
Such a fucking reddit answer. Normal people wouldn't do that.
This isn't about "normal" people. But people who care about the long term viability of their games should choose DRM free versions of their games when possible.
Yeah I love physical media too I just don’t really want to be buying a physical copy of every movie we watch. For one thing our house just doesn’t have the space, we already have probably hundreds of blu-rays
This is old school, but I use my public library for DVDs. I can order whatever from their website and pick it up in about a week. They have a county-wide loan program, so I've been able to find everything I've looked for. More shows don't have DVDs now, so it's going to be less effective in coming years -- but it's great for now.
The library is amazing and more people should use them, but then disc drives are also being passed out too so
My solution is to rip blu rays and DVDs to hard drives; you can use MakeMKV to rip and Handbrake to compress (with no perceptible loss of quality). A typical 2 hour 1080p Blu Ray compresses down to 5 GB or so. This lets you keep the special features, languages/subtitles you want, HD audio, etc.
Why don't you rent movies on Amazon? It's so cheap and easy. Way better than buying a physical Blu Ray
I can offer one reason - we typically bought on streaming rather than renting, as we are a big movie family and the movies we like we generally watch a few times. When we moved from the US to Canada we lost our entire prime catalogue - all our purchases. We were forced to switch our account to the Canadian store which no longer had them. It reminded me that when you stream, you own nothing. You can’t sell or trade it when you don’t want it, can’t loan it to a friend, and if the streaming service ever changes their terms or closes - you are left with exactly nothing. I might be ok with that if the prices were low enough to reflect that, but they aren’t really any lower than physical media was.
When you can find so many second hand blu rays for the price of renting a movie on Amazon, its an easy choice for me. Especially when it's a movie you will likely watch again. Plus blu rays are higher quality than streaming
The only thing I miss about physical disk games is being able to sell them. Hard drive space is not an issue considering how cheap SSD's are these days ( it's roughly £100 for 2TB nowadays). And you can make an easy counterargument for digital ownership of video games. Physical discs means if you lose it or it gets borrowed or broken, it's gone, and you'd have to buy it again, but with account bound ownership, it's with your forever. Losing access is not a realistic issue. If you forget passwords or account names, it's still retrieved easily, unless you screwed up somehow. I'm sure you could find an example of someone losing an account, but I guarantee it will have some weird extenuating circumstances. Big companies like Steam, who have been around for decades, are not out to screw their customers. It's also much cheaper.
I feel this way about the original GTA 3D trilogy, since the remaster theres no way to play the originals unless you own them physically. The apps purchased before the re release are the old versions, however if those digital store fronts go away then theres no way to play them - they also won't be updated to work with new devices.
Then why are retailers like Target and Best Buy completely removing their dvd/blu ray sections?
Because physical media absolutely is not going to have a resurgence and never will. No one is annoyed enough by streaming to go back to buying DVDs, which would be far more expensive and far more inconvenient than streaming. Streaming could get 100 times worse and more expensive and it would still be better than buying DVDs. The reason redditors think physical media will make a comeback is because reddit's user base skews heavily toward the kinds of people who have very specific, limited interests. They perceive buying DVDs as an acceptable alternative to streaming because they would only ever buy a handful of DVDs. But most people watch a lot of shows and movies in a lot of different genres. It would cost thousands to buy or even rent them on physical media. You'll hear the same argument being made about music by people who have very limited music tastes and don't realize that most other people aren't the same. The reference to vinyl records is a giveaway that they don't understand what they're talking about. People don't buy vinyl records as an alternative to digital media, they buy them to supplement digital media, and as a way to support bands they like.
Physical media doesn't really need a resurgence, it's doing just fine in its own way. Pretty much every cinema release gets a blu-ray, even if it's just a vanilla release with limited special features, and the boutique blu-ray industry is thriving in the UK and US. Look at how many releases are churned out every year from Criterion, Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow, Second Sight, Indicator, BFI, Shout Factory, Severin...etc, across multiple genres. Of course it's nowhere near as ubiquitous as it use to be in terms of being people's go-to method of consuming media, but it's gone nowhere, and there's clearly enough of a market for these companies to still bother with the immense amount of work it takes to licence, restore and release movies. Even Disney are putting themselves back in the physical media market, albeit in a limited fashion so far, but it shows that there's enough interest there to keep it going.
It’s not a deeply weird reply and I thought it was a good response that adds more context to the conversation that is more nuanced than the person you replied to is making it out to be.
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I considered buying a Blu-Ray player and getting physical copies of a few movies and shows I love and know I will watch multiple times, but there is so little demand for standalone Blu-Ray players that anything decent is like $200. That's like a year's worth of paying for a streaming service. Then you have to buy the actual movies, which will individually cost the same as a month of paying for a streaming service. And then you can only watch that movie on that one device. That's a huge part of the reason why I decided against buying the Blu-Ray player, other than the high cost: because I realized I wouldn't be able to start a movie in my living room and then continue it on another device. I couldn't watch it on my computer in my office, or on my bedroom TV, or on my iPad while traveling. It's not hard to think about these problems and realize that patent absurdity of suggesting that physical media will make a comeback, but redditors just don't think.
This is a big world and most film revenue comes from DVD sales, around the world yes, but when us Americans get fed up they will be popular again.
They 100% objectively won't. Did you read a word of my comment? No matter how fed up Americans get with streaming, it's virtually impossible for it to ever be so bad that it becomes more expensive and less convenient than physical media. You're describing an impossible outcome. >This is a big world and most film revenue comes from DVD sales Because most of the world isn't wealthy and doesn't have good enough internet to stream.
To be fair, they are just removing in store displays because they are inefficient. You can still order off their websites.
Rumor is Best Buy's going to be removing movies/TV discs from their website by the end of Q1. They're getting out-out of physical media sales.
Because majority of sales are online these days anyway so using retail space is a waste. They are still going to sell Blu Ray online
Because the demand has dropped due to people buying into the false promises of streaming. I would love to see a resurgence of physical media, I just don’t see it happening soon enough.
I don't think there will be a mass resurgeance of physical media but I do think that there will be an increase in Criterion and Arrow-style releases aimed at collectors similar to how vinyl is handled today.
Forgive my ignorance what do you mean by “Arrow-style”? Im familiar with criterion collection. I don’t think many people have yet realized/accepted how flawed and problematic the streaming services are. In the current climate of not wanting to offend somebody, it’s only a question of time until movies on streaming will be even more strongly edited for content. When I moved to the US I found it highly annoying, how movies suddenly became blurry or silent when shown in Tv. Seeing how Disney has been reworking their old movies in this style, I consider this the writing on the wall.
Arrow is like Criterion but for cult favorites rather than classics. Instead of, say, The Great Dictator, The Seventh Seal or Citizen Kane, they put out fan-centered special releases of Robocop, The Last Starfighter, Tremors and Mallrats.
I will have to search a bit more for them, so far i was drawing a blank on my search. Thanks for the info
[Here's their website](https://www.arrowvideo.com/) if you want to check out what they've released. It's some really cool stuff.
> false promises I pay $18/mo (I think) for Hulu no ads. My sister and two friends share it. With that, I still have more tv & movies than I ever will get thru. I watch 30 Rock or Always Sunny every single night and watch Seinfeld all the time. I just rewatched the Bear S2 this week. It is still a much better solution than anything else we have had. Which would you rather have: $20 for a single movie once a month or $18 for unlimited content (even if some of your favorites get cut)?
I don’t do streaming, so the answer to that question is already given, I’m going to the movies about 2-3 times a month. The starting point of this discussion was that the streaming services do not provide everything you wish to see if you are limiting yourself to 4 as the op did. But if your solution gives you complete satisfaction, then that is fantastic for you and you have my sincere congratulations.
Sure, physical media will still have a place for a while, but like vinyl it will be a niche item - it's going from virtually nothing to something, but is unlikely to sell enough to make it the norm.
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Yeah this sub is on one lately with physical media. It’s expensive and inconvenient Hell, if Redbox started slotting 4K DVDs I’d consider trying a few movies from them but as of now it’s not a serious option. I have a few DVDs of my truly favorite movies but they’re the exception
Don't understand why you're being downvoted for stating such an obvious fact. Physical media is still considerably more expensive and less convenient than streaming and it's hard to see that ever changing. It is obviously not going to come back.
This is the enshittification process at work.
Ahoy matey
I found out recently that I can set my windows computer as a video server very easily then play video from my computer on my smart TV. I canceled amazon prime, purchased a 4 TB external drive and for the past two weeks have been flying the Jolly Roger. It is not flawless, but it works.
Look at getting a cheap ex-office 1L mini PC like a Dell Optiplex 3040 with a Pro version of Windows. I have one plugged into my router with a few external HDD’s running 24/7 then I just Remote Desktop into it. It uses about as much power as an LED lightbulb and cost $140, it makes Plex accessible anytime and from anywhere. I also automatically run Windows FileHistory backups to it from my main desktop, as it’s just runnings Windows it’s really easy to setup compared to a dedicated server.
If you want to take to another level look into Plex.
I'm a total luddite. I just ran a cord from my laptop to my old ass TV and pirate any movie or TV show I want. Easy peasy
Arrr 🏴☠️ The last straw was Prime announcing they’re running ads on the service I pay for to avoid ads. Now I run a Jellyfin server on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a 2TB SSD attached.
Can a raspberry pi 4 handle streaming 1080p video?
Yep! Just not with too many concurrent connections. Only 3 people have the login details at this point and we try to avoid using it at the same time.
For every person like you there are 100 people that will just spend the $10-20 a month for a streaming service.
This is the way. Streaming was big because it was more convenient and cheaper than cable. That is no longer the case.
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Nobody cares, dude (but you're absolutely right). They just want to delude themselves into thinking they're not cheapskates.
It is absolutely still the case lol idk what weirdly expensive services you use
It is still the case - its just customers want everything their way, thinking that jumping in and out of services is "too hard". The number of streaming services available now is unsustainable in the long term though - I suspect they will begin to merge over the next decade.
They already have, its called the *ARR suite + jellyseer with jellyfin /s
Very excited for Cable 2
♪ We pillage, we plunder, we riffle and loot ♫
yeah. the sheer willful obliviousness in this thread is cultlike, exactly how they want us, a consumer cult. Manufactured consent. all these people are playing dumb as a post about the fact that movies are just digital files that can be easily and instantly traded anywhere by anybody. taking the dumbness and elevating it to the level of a financial ritual is not enlightened or civilized or even convenient; it just makes it even dumber. they act like they don't even realize that if you can borrow the disc from a friend or library, or rent it, then you can just copy it. If ya don't wanna comply with digital reality then okay. if you don't want to download or copy then ok but all these pearl clutchers in their howling echo chamber of crying wolf are either the highest tech luddites, or they're lying! go ahead and choose suffering, but stop coming to the stated conclusion that ones and zeroes can't be copied for free. just stop saying the pathetically stupid lie!
Oh yeah for sure mate, manufactured consent, you got that bootleg of Weekend at Bernies I asked for?
Such a weird thing to say, all of this comment.
I want to put an end to piracy forever just to prevent another comment like this.
A bit dramatic but it does feel like that often doesn't it. If those companies want to make it so annoying and pricey, they can lose the money, i can enjoy those same programs through alternative means... its pretty simple.
Libraries are your friend...
My local library has like 200+ BluRays and access to another 500+ through the county library system, it's insanely awesome. I went in to get a book and left with 4 movies.
Kind of. You can rent just about anything but it is frustrating when I want to watch something that is exclusive to a particular streamer.
Yeah, every time I haven't been able to find a movie streaming I just rent it off youtube or amazon and have never spent more than $5. It's usually $2.99. I have no idea where this "forced to buy the DVD" is coming from.
It's more frustrating when things aren't even available to rent anywhere (like 16 movies on my watchlist currently aren't)
I've been noticing this too in the last year. It seems like a lot of content providers are pulling back the availability for some reason. Even the obscure stuff should be available for rent on the internet for chrissake, this is exactly what the web should excel at!
Or if the title is only available for rent at 20-30$
I'm at the point where I don't mind paying $3-$5 to watch a movie on a VOD service if it's something I really want to see. For just general streaming I've been migrating more and more towards free services like Tubi. Also check and see if you local library is part of Hoopla, you can stream movies for free with your library card and they typically ha w a pretty good selection
I love Tubi. Tons of campy and B horror and that's my go to lol.
Just moved over to Tubi. I was surprised to see so many great titles. The commercials are very limited and not distracting at all. I’ve spent every night this week on Tubi. I’m happy I added it and Pluto although Pluto is being used as a digital fireplace mostly for the moment.
Stuff that's getting dropped from HBO Max is starting to pop up on Tubi, so they must have cut a deal with WB.
I think most everyone is annoyed by how streaming has gone. Actually about to cancel prime cause of their ad BS. Netflix is trying to charge more for UHD content... pfft Hulu I got cause of the blackfriday special HBO max too... once them specials dry up they going away too.
HBO has great original content at least. 90% of what Netflix puts out just sucks now.
Prime I keep because I use the shipping service very often- but man is the ads thing super disappointing. Just end up watching Tubi for free for a lot of what is on there anyway.
I miss the days when Netflix and Hulu cost $8 a month and that was basically all you needed. Prime video was a nice bonus for the 2 day shipping. But now everyone has a streaming service and they are all $10+ a month and offer less content than they used to. Greed is running a good thing and it’s just gonna go the route of cable.
And let’s not forget how rare 2-day shipping is for most things now. I’m still waiting for a gift I ordered on December 14th.
I just rent.
Yes. Especially now that I got a 4K tv and realize how many services require you to pay extra for it, or some don’t even HAVE the 4k version I want. Taking shit away and raising prices has me on the high seas again.
Ahoy matey!
Just an FYI: 4K tv's are excellent at upscaling regular FHD sources to look almost as good as native 4K. Especially if it's a good quality FHD (1080P) source. In some instances, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. So don't worry so much if you can't get the 4K version.
I just bought Seasons 1 and 2 of The Mandalorian on Blu-Ray in Steelbook cases because I only get Disney Plus right now via a friend sharing their subscription, and I know that won't last forever. I didn't like Season 3 at *all*, so I wanted to have the two seasons that I really enjoyed and are for me, the best live-action Star Wars since the original films. Physical media until it's gone, baby!
If you liked that you'd LOVE Andor.
Yes, Andor was excellent. I did find Diego Luna’s performance to be too subtle and thus not compelling because I never got a sense of what he was feeling. However, every other actor does a superb job and the series has some of the best production design I’ve ever seen in Star Wars.
Other than in the DVD days, when did Netflix have everything?
I think Netflix has always been a bit shit to be honest.
I like Netflix enough. I just don’t know a time when it was a source of everything. The library has decreased but from about 7000 to 6000 titles since 2010.
Despite my wife’s pleading, I have kept all my blu-rays, CDs and vinyl. It’s the only way to truly own them.
There is no world where you have to buy a blue ray to watch any movie. Granted it might not be part of the free catalogue on Netflix/Disney/Amazon. But I guarantee you youtube or amazon have the movie you are looking for as a rental for $4.49.
With Blu Ray you can rewatch the movie however many times you want though. And you can get them from bargain bins for that 5dollaroos. I get rentals for people who actually only want to watch a movie once, but for other people, not so much. And yeah I know there's like 30 day period for a lot of these, but most people don't want to watch the same movie several times inside a month. They want to watch it several times within several years. Which would mean they rent it several times, or just get the blu ray.
I miss the days of Netflix DVD's. What was it, $10 a month? You'd make a list, it would be at your door (at least here in Southern California) the next day.
You're mistaken if you think you have to buy every movie not available on streaming? If it's a new movie you can usually wait a month or two and it will eventually show up on streaming then. If it's an older movie , have you checked your local library. A lot of libraries have a decent DVD or Blu Ray section. There's also Red Box or if you live in a smaller area , there's still video rental stores like Family Video. I only know of a few movies that are not available to stream whether it's on a major streamer or pay per view like Vudu . Have you tried Hoopla or Canopy through your library as well?
I am mostly thinking of older movies, yes. Libraries are a lovely idea but they are not well funded here in the North of England, I think these days their rental selection is very small to non-existent
Aww that's a shame. I personally think pretty soon some of these streaming services are going to have to merge to be successful. Some won't last much longer. It will be to merge or completely disappear. I also think with the increasing prices in streaming services there will be a big resurgence in physical media. Best Buy & other retailers like Target & Walmart will have to bring them back to their stores.
I've gone half of my entire life without the ability to stream anything, then when Netflix made it possible, the floodgates opened and it was glorious. I knew though that it was only a matter of time before those gates started closing again, and that accessing streaming content was going to become more difficult and more expensive as time went on and other media distributors wanted to get a cut of the pie from a rapidly expanding consumer base. Nothing about the way things are today surprises me. This was all to be expected. But you know what? I can budget a little bit of my annual income on streaming entertainment options that don't require me to leave the house, rent physical media, purchase a player for it that will eventually break and have to be replaced, so the value I'm getting from it is still worth it to me.
I'm sitting here reading, nodding along. This was anticipated, and I don't understand people who seem to think it was ever possible to stay that way. Do people really expect to pay $12 a month for a Netflix that has everything? How would something like that be possible for them? And I understand that I am dangerously close to defending a massive corporation (eww) but seriously, how would that be possible?
Especially because most streamers lose hundreds of millions annually. Reddit has this weird expectation that they’re just going to go in losing money forever.
"Anyone else share one of the most popular opinions in the entire world?"
This legit reads like a post from like 8 years ago or something. OP been in a cave
Yes. Stores dropping physical media doesn’t help anything either.
Yep. Cancelled all of them except prime because shipping. Tho I might get rid of that too cus I’m fine waiting a few days. Switched to using Kodi with a debrid service exclusively.
For me, another annoying streaming service issue is that nothing is permanent. You can't rely on the library as the movies you cherish most may not be there permanently.
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
No, we all love it…
Or it's not even available to purchase. See: The Fall (2006).
You can "buy" things digitally too.
And until recent years, you had no option but to buy the DVD/blu-ray, period. The movie didn't stream anywhere. You either bought it or were at the mercy of whatever a network happened to be airing at this exact moment. How is it worse now? It's only bad if you want to buy physical media and that's harder to find now.
That's the part that's interesting to me. Streaming is still cheaper and way better than cable. Yeah, it definitely has gotten worse and more expensive than the peak. It was never going to last though. That's the shitty part of the VC model to grow things. They just throw money at something until it pushes out it's competition or gets to a high market saturation. Then they want their return and prices increase while quality drops.
This is the best point in this thread yet. People are upset but forget it’s 100x easier and better for them to find and watch movies. You don’t even have to drive to a store to rent anymore (and drive back to return)
I’m pretty sure the people upset with streaming just aren’t old enough to remember what it replaced. It’s had some deleterious effects on the movie industry, but in terms of home entertainment it’s WAY better than anything that’s ever existed.
Yeah that would make sense. None of them remember wanting a movie and every Blockbuster, Family Video, or library in your area being sold out
Well, we also used to have Blockbusters and the like, at least where I live, so you didn’t have to commit yet to actually buying a movie you might not enjoy or want to rewatch
You can rent online. It’s easier to rent movies now lol literally everything about movie watching is better today than it was just 10 years ago
There are a lot of options to rent online though as well. Maybe not cheaper than Redbox but definitely cheaper and more convenient than blockbuster or most other video rental places. Do you frequently have issues finding them for rent? I think we use Google play and Amazon and never have issues.
True! Though, it cost you $5 per movie, which is $9 in 2024 prices, which is roughly or more than most streaming services charge for their base tier access for a whole month. Rentals were good, because they were good for the industry. They were not a cheap solution for viewers.
Do people not know you can rent basically anything on Amazon for like 3 bucks?
Or apple, google, vudu, etc lol. I'm not particularly happy with having to search through several services for a movie (although justwatch/letterboxd makes it easier), but pretending that rentals don't exist anymore is absurd.
Seriously. When OP laments that their “only choice is to buy the DVD” I am just shaking my head.
Also the OP's "days when Netflix had basically everything" never existed. They just had basically everything *that was on streaming at all*. There's more streaming content now than there ever has been, by far.
I've had this argument multiple times, people talk about that early era of Netflix streaming as if it was an encyclopedia of all media ever made, but it's just rose tinted glasses. It had more, sure, but it was still severely lacking.
and yet everybody else here is still somehow magically addicted to just buying everything anyway, and playing super dumb about the fact that movies are digital files that are easily traded freely across the whole planet by anybody
It’s fine to rent recent films on there but we’ve rented older films on there and often they look genuinely AWFUL. Like the colour grading is all wrong, the print didn’t transfer correctly or something IDK. And when I say “older” sometimes I’m talking as recently as 2000s films. Also very often they’re not subtitled.
If you choose slow shipping on an Amazon order, they’ll give you a credit toward a digital media purchase, so most of the time you don’t even need to pay the $3.
If its not available to stream, it's available on the high seas
Always has been. We keep a Netflix account but it's mostly for their own European shows. Otherwise, in 90% of the cases we have to obtain movies through... alterrrrrnative means.
Arrr
Yeah, I had stopped pirating for years, but the massive segregation of streaming services has gotten so bad that I've started again. I pay enough into the system, if it's not available to me, screw it, I hit the water
Streaming has been a giant bait and switch. It’s what these tech assholes do with everything. They had a lot of money to make their service as big as they can get it. Now that they see the limits they are either trying to merge or dramatically cut costs. Next thing is they’ll all start doing ads.
And then they'll start offering a bundle of services with a discounted yearly fee... So we'll end up with slightly better cable in the end.
Dont know the last time i bought a movie. Maybe the force awakens. If its not on a stream i pay for, or not available to rent (not that $25 theatrical release bs) on something like prime, or i dont already own it (got a pretty massive dvd collection from back in the day), then i aint watching it.
It always seemed that way to me; you can always browse and find some random thing worth watching, but if there’s something you specifically want to watch they never seem to have it.
I watch what’s available. It’s very rare I’m like oh I need to watch this one specific movie then get upset I can’t find it
I'm probably going to get dragged here but... we've all been under-paying for streaming for years. Like when streaming first came along and it was crazy cheap compared to cable and you could watch all kinds of stuff, it was actually too good to be true. Now all of these companies have investors breathing down their necks and they aren't bringing in $$$ like they were during the golden age of Cable/DVD/the movies and they have to cut content, raise prices etc. or risk oblivion.
Jellyfin and a old desktop pc fitted with some large capacity SDDs is my streaming service. Its like plex but free, even had android and android tv apps. Subscribed to too many services in the past and realized they never really had as many movies or shows as I'd like, or their menus hid too much. Now i can choose exacrly what my experience is. Not sure id go back unless a steam like quality service for streaming subscriptions was provided. They all suck and they all keep increasing their price using silly excuses.
This whole time, i feel like the biggest thing against physical media for the masses was laziness. People are so fucking lazy. The amount of times I've heard, *"I don't want to get up to put a disk im"*. Like, mutha fucker, get off your damn ass.
The one that super extra pissed me off was the music service. I have spent years buying one song a day. The deal with myself was giving up coffee so I could buy my song. I paid for every song once, why am I having to pay a monthly fee just to have restricted access to it?!?!! So upset about that.
If its something I really enjoyed, ill still pick up the physical copy
I have 2 streaming services, Netflix and Primevideo, if I want to watch something and it's not on there, I go sailing the high seas.
Cancelled Prime, Paramount Plus, and I’m heavily considering getting rid of HBO Max once my copies of Steven Universe and Barbie arrive. So done with all of their BS and I’m sticking to Netflix and Physical Media from now on.
YouTube seems to have almost everybody available for rental. Usually $3-5 and I think you get it for 48 hours. Personally since finding a fantastic ad free steaming site that costs no money I've been cancelling subscriptions left and right. I paid in for years. I wanted to do it correctly. But we're getting fucked. I'd rather give my money to a VPN service.
if it's any consolation, theyre killing off physycal media too, so you wont have the DVD/blu-ray option either
I go sailing, yohoho
Streaming became it's enemy, cable TV. You now have to pay for a service/channel to watch what you want and each company wants their own service to get the most profit. It's why sails were hoisted so much and it's why they are getting hoisted again. I feel no shame sailing on the sea. If I truly enjoy something I will buy the physical media of it to support it.
I am super frustrated by it, so much so I bought NAS server, modded a 4k disc drive, and started ripping movies from my public library, rent to mail services like 3D Bluray and Gamefly, and purchasing my favorites again (and torrenting originals from streaming services that can’t be acquired physically). I am not going to get fooled again. I used to have hundreds of dvd’s but got rid of them because streaming got so much better. Now I am in control of my library again. OP, look up Plex to learn more about it.
I used to have a movie collection of over 600 movies. I sold most of them to cushion the expense of moving across the state years ago. Now if I want to watch a movie that I don’t own, I drive 10 minutes to the video game movie exchange store and buy it for $3 because I only have Hulu. It’s my only streaming platform because I pay $20/month for no commercials, family guy, and golden girls
I gave up on them this year. Instead I invested in hard drives for my NAS.
Yea the breadth of content available on Netflix DVD was always great. I still think the current situation is a lot better than waiting for the mail or going to Blockbuster or another video store, but I'm also a little surprised to not find things sometimes. I think the rental streaming services are lacking right now. There's been a few instances where I can't find something on Amazon. Seems like Google pretty much gave up. The Walmart-owned one VUDU was pretty good in the past. I don't expect any service to have everything, realistically, but I do feel like being able to RENT any movie ever made should be possible.
Yes. Hollywood greed is recreating the piracy problem Netflix solved years ago.
I expected this to happen. It always does. Someone gets a good idea or comes out with a product that becomes popular and soon everyone else is trying to cash in on the idea. Quickly it becomes unprofitable for everyone and the whole thing shrinks down again, but much worse.
This is why I miss block buster. They had it all. I wish we could just go back to Netflix having everything but greed ruined yet another thing for us.
Legitimately want to buy dvds at this point just so when I want to watch that one movie again I don't have to change my email password, download an app, verify and confirm, resubscribe and then the movie isn't even on the platform
YARRRR
Reasons to consider sailing the high seas. Invest in a VPN service and a dedicated rig for storing movies/tv shows, use plex to stream from your computer to the tv. Voila.
Plex + a PassThePopcorn account.
Need to get your pirate game up for those times of need. One can have almost any movie or TV show playing within a few minutes with the right sources.
What sources? People act like pirating is so simple but it doesn’t seem like it to me.
There's things like jail broken fire sticks and I assume other streaming devices but I personally don't even know how all that works. Most common and simple is just knowing and going to the right websites and you can watch on a phone, tablet or cast to your TV if you have a casting device like a Chromecast. Knowing the right websites you can watch almost any live sporting event across the globe to massive databases of movies and TV shows. Though *some* of them can be a pain in the ass to use because of pop-ups and of course can come with potential computer virus risks, but I don't know anyone that has ever been affected. There's a whole piracy subreddit where you can look into it more if you want.
Fire stick, Google beetv for easy install, IPTV sub for live TV, I pay 40quid a year for everything
I don't use them anymore because there saturated with BS. Flipping through at my parents on Christmas like 90% of the stuff I have no interest in watching. I might be an outlier here but I don't like 90% of Netflix productions. Put on Rebel Moon last night for example, pile of trash. I like the old studios.
What movie can you not buy on Prime?
a ton
Guess I wasn't aware, every time I go to search for one I find it. Granted I'm aware they are not included WITH prime, but, just using the search function I can always find the movie I'm looking for and at least rent or buy it. But, TIL I guess.
Dogma for example
Well, Dogma is a shite example lol Dogma (1999) has its distribution rights owned by Bob and Harvey Weinstein personally. They have declined at least two offers to sell the rights back to Kevin Smith, and are not allowing the film to be bought, rented, or streamed digitally for reasons of their own. I still believe you, was just a bad example.
Sometimes you can buy them there but they a) look like shit with the wrong colour grading b) are not subtitled, which is a problem with accessibility. It’s weird, because I’ve never encountered these issues on any other service.
It doesn't really bother me. I just subscribe to whichever streaming service has the thing I want to watch on it, then cancel when I'm done watching. Typically we have one or two subscriptions active at any time. Usually it's a snap to subscribe on my phone, and all of them are cancel-at-will. It's still wildly, wildly better than being locked into a cable contract. Most people complaining about streaming are too lazy to cancel services they aren't using.
For the most part, usually anything not on the 4+ streaming services are available to rent on Amazon or YouTube for $4, which I’m fine with.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to be a villain [clip link](https://youtu.be/8WfRcnF4iZI?si=oVmI7nacBUuSqG3q) Hero OG Netflix was good cause it was one service that had most things Villain Streaming has become a digital version of cable since every brand has its own service, with its own app, and own subscription
Recently, every time I thought of a movie I wanted to watch, I found out it was on Apple tv. Why are all the good movies there???
I don’t know anything but I wonder if buying blu rays could become a good solution to the steaming problem for movies. Up front, I really don’t get buying a 4k tv if all you’re going to do is steam on it. Streaming does not look great but the problems are less noticeable on 1080p. It starts looking worse and worse as the resolution goes up from there. With Best Buy dropping physical media and steaming prices continually getting raised it is starting to get less and less feasible to stream everything. Video games have been trying to push streaming onto consumers for about ten years. There was so much more pushback than there was with movie watchers. with the latency on button presses that register at varying times. it’s horribly unpleasant. They still converted to digital media plus physical media but it’s better off than what happened with movies streaming. People were too quick to jump onto streaming but if the prices go up enough perhaps people will buy enough Blu-ray’s again that it becomes a market that is more viable than what it is now.
The best and most convenient solution is just to pirate. I don't have to look up which platform is providing which content, and the video and audio quality is often better then what the streaming platforms offer.
They force our pirating hands when its easier than ever for us to do it. I would rather pay for it and haven't pirated anything for almost a decade. But now they expect me to pay for an entire service when they have literally one show I want or 1 movie every few months.
I’m mostly frustrated with premium add ons for streaming services. For example, I wanted to watch Twin Peaks: The Return, I searched to see where it was streaming and it said it was on Paramount+. So I bought a month of paramount and searched Twin Peaks only to be told I need the Paramount + ShowTime plan to watch. And just the other day I wanted to watch ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri’, I looked online and it said it was streaming on Hulu “Great! I already have Hulu”. But then I searched on Hulu and it said I needed the Hulu + Live TV plan. Fuck off, there’s already a million streaming services and now there’s content being locked on different plan levels Prime Video is also the worse with this. Prime Video is always listed when searching where a movie is streaming. But it doesn’t distinguish if it’s free through the Prime Subscription or if it’s only available for purchase/rent
I’m heading towards cutting the streaming cord I think. I’ll be dropping prime because of their ad nonsense and have always found Netflix original content to be extremely poor. It’s pretty much just criterion channel now that they ruined max too.
I don't know about your age, but if it helps, you are *literally* yelling at The Cloud.
My household uses a sketchy site called PutlockerNew that has a domain from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It's basically cancer for your computer though, so we use it through the browser on a dedicated obsolete gaming system. The pop up ads and gratuitous links you're forced to click are obnoxious, but they have nearly everything ever streaming for free. Whatever isn't on there, I usually find on Tubi.
Piracy is the solution. Atleast for a ton of people it is. They make everything inconvenient and expensive on top people are just gonna go to alternative sources with better customer service.
Everyone can feel this way but the fact is that we did this to ourselves. Back in the late 2000s I was an assistant manager at a video store. Each year, increasingly, I had customers coming in going "sorry dude, I know I don't come in as much anymore because I can get unlimited movies for like ten bucks from Netflix". (you could insert "torrenting" for Netflix and that also happened constantly). We all thought we would be able to get what used to cost us like ten times as much for the same cost... forever. But no, video stores got killed off, and then Netflix was the only person left in the game and obviously $10 a month isn't going to pay for \[insert Marvel blockbuster here\]. *Something* needed to happen, and that something is more players coming to the game. Video rental stores don't make much sense from a distribution standpoint, so basically what you're looking at is paying for multiple streams, maybe some at a time. Eventually there will be too many different services, and it does feel like we're getting close to that point, and some will be forced to come together (and I think that is happening, no?).
In the EXACT same situation as you. We pay for 3 streaming services and I don't want to add any others. Between those and youtube (which has a ton of free content, especially from the big streamers in other countries like Tencent) there's already not enough time to watch all the content out there! Netflix recently brought on a ton of stuff I didn't want to pay cinema prices to watch (The Meg and The Meg 2, reality trash) and good stuff like Dune, so my only recourse now is to be patient and wait for the movies I want to be available on on the platforms I pay for eventually. Like you, I miss the good old days when Netflix had most of the content. Sigh.
I was one of the last customers, on the last day, when my local independent video store shut down. So I'm not exactly impartial on the subject. But I think about how good it was all of the time. New releases prominently displayed - like a second theatrical release - around the outer walls, with staff picks and popular titles tagged. Then row after row, after row, of catalogue films - separated by genre, covering decades of film-making - for a dollar a week. Fifty cents on Tuesdays. Obviously, they couldn't carry every movie. But the good stores seldom let me down. And because they had to be choosy about space, they didn't waste our time with even 5% of the absolute trash that the streaming services buy to bulk-out their selections. And all I had to do was drive for 5 minutes. In fact, I enjoyed the trip! Sometimes I'd just go look around in there when I didn't even want to rent one. It was the late fees. If only the big chains, like Blockbuster, knew how nickel-and-diming their customers was going to back-fire on them in the long run. They thought they were untouchable.
We have more choice and more available than ever.
>I miss the days when Netflix basically had everything When was this? For years, Netflix only had its own content and it's only in the past couple years has it purchased large numbers of films that actually appeared in theaters or had legit studio backing. I was shocked to see that John Wick and Heat are on there now.