There's More Film and Television For You To Watch Than Ever Before - Good Luck Finding It (salon.com) 84
The entertainment industry has achieved an unprecedented milestone: more film and television content exists today than at any point in human history. The technical infrastructure to deliver this content directly to consumers' homes works flawlessly. The problem? Actually finding something to watch has become a user experience nightmare that would make early-2000s software developers cringe.
Multiple streaming platforms are suffering from fundamental interface design failures that actively prevent users from discovering content. Cameron Nudleman, an Austin-based user, told Salon that scrolling through streaming service landing pages feels "like a Herculean task," while his Amazon Fire Stick setup -- designed to consolidate multiple services -- delivers consistent crashes across Paramount+ and Max, with Peacock terminating randomly "for no discernible reason."
The technical problems extend beyond stability issues to basic functionality failures. Max automatically enables closed captions despite user preferences, while Paramount+ crashes during show transitions. Chicago media writer Tim O'Reilly describes "every single interface" as "complete garbage except for Netflix's," though even Netflix has recently implemented changes that degrade user experience.
The industry eliminated simple discovery mechanisms like newspaper listings and Moviefone's telephone service in favor of algorithm-driven interfaces that Tennessee attorney Claire Tuley says have "turned art into work," transforming what was supposed to "democratize movies" into "a system that requires so many subscriptions, searching and effort."
Multiple streaming platforms are suffering from fundamental interface design failures that actively prevent users from discovering content. Cameron Nudleman, an Austin-based user, told Salon that scrolling through streaming service landing pages feels "like a Herculean task," while his Amazon Fire Stick setup -- designed to consolidate multiple services -- delivers consistent crashes across Paramount+ and Max, with Peacock terminating randomly "for no discernible reason."
The technical problems extend beyond stability issues to basic functionality failures. Max automatically enables closed captions despite user preferences, while Paramount+ crashes during show transitions. Chicago media writer Tim O'Reilly describes "every single interface" as "complete garbage except for Netflix's," though even Netflix has recently implemented changes that degrade user experience.
The industry eliminated simple discovery mechanisms like newspaper listings and Moviefone's telephone service in favor of algorithm-driven interfaces that Tennessee attorney Claire Tuley says have "turned art into work," transforming what was supposed to "democratize movies" into "a system that requires so many subscriptions, searching and effort."
Re: It’s easy (Score:2)
dvb-c and -t work flawlessly here... -s works too but can't be arsed with crypts anymore...
Piracy is the solution (Score:2, Offtopic)
Downmodders go bootlick our rich masters elsewhere. I'm not OP as I give zero fucks about karma.
Conventional morality un-reciprocated is vain wank our masters wisely consider weakness.
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Re: It’s easy (Score:2)
Or just search watch series, they have everything
The war for your attention. (Score:3, Informative)
Someone needs to remind all these jokers that "user engagement" isn't an accurate short-term or long-term metric for user satisfaction, and that unless your business plan is a advertising-revenue-supported social media website, trying to target increases in user engagement with your UI creates perverse incentives that will eventually burn through your public good will and cause an exodus of paying users the moment something bad happens to the economy or something better comes along from one of your competitors. The only thing keeping all these fools' businesses afloat right now is that they're all more or less equally bad.
Can't compete with back catalog (Score:2)
There are thousands of old TV shows spanning 1949 to today to watch.
New streaming content is competing with the back-catalog and is losing.
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I find that their recommendation algorithms are often the biggest barrier to finding stuff to watch. YouTube is so bad for it that I often watch things in private browsing mode because if I don't it will recommend 100 similar videos that I don't want to watch. Having seen a couple of reviews of something from channels I trust, I don't need to see another 10.
The best recommendations I've had have been the ones that are a bit different to what I normally watch. A while back YouTube recommended someone playing
I use Justwatch.com (Score:5, Insightful)
I basically keep listing of stuff I want to watch and what service it is on. For the obvious ones (Stranger Things S5, Andor's new season, Wednesday etc), it's of course obvious, but if I suddenly decide to check something out (recently: Star Trek Strange New Worlds), I just use justwatch.com to find what platform it is on.
Once there's enough stuff on one service and too little on the one I'm currently subscribed to, I just switch. Kid has also grown up enough that she doesn't demand Disney+.
I still hope they'd at some point get the equivalent of Spotify or Apple music or Tidal. Apart from very few exclusives, everyone is on all services, and musicians get their due depending on the number of plays. Why couldn't the streaming services just provide access to everything and pass the fees to producers depending on views? ...like, you know, Netflix used to!
Re:I use Justwatch.com (Score:4, Insightful)
my vote is pirate everything until streamings start to do that, all with mostly the same (yes, new shows can be exclusive for x time, but them shared by everyone... this applies to all platforms) and people choose what works better for them and is cheaper.
but no, they want everything, so the response is that they get nothing, pirate everything until they break
Re: I use Justwatch.com (Score:2)
This reminds me of something that happened at Starbucks today. I ordered a drink with less ice and they gave me half a drink. I told them I want my money back and Iâ(TM)ll never come back again. I looked on my credit card and I spent $670 there last year. So the bean counters have decided itâ(TM)s better to save $.25 on milk than to keep a $670 customer.
It's an old movie theater thing (Score:2)
Movie theaters wanted to increase profits so they made every soft-drink half ice, so people started asking for no ice or low ice in their drinks, and the theaters cut down the amount of drink people could get, so everyone started smuggling in cold cokes in their girlfriend's purses. The shareholders always want higher profits so their retirement accounts go up.
Re: I use Justwatch.com (Score:3)
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And nothing of value was lost....
Starbucks make *terrible* coffee. For whatever reason that seems to fly in the US, but starbucks have struggled h
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I agree Starbucks is shit coffee but you can find it in any first world country and many developing just like McDonalds. For some reason other countries like our shittiest food. Food that is likely at least partially behind our obesity problems.
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Re: I use Justwatch.com (Score:3)
The bean counters there also chose to use slave labor coffee and chocolate, but that didn't bother you because it didn't affect you.
Re: I use Justwatch.com (Score:2)
I have asked at clothing stores: few patrons know anything about source of materials. Many have never even heard there is an issue. I have never tested this at Starbucks but would not surprise me if the vast vast majority of patrons have never thought to ask behind the scenes of supply chains.
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Pro Tip: no coffee monkey cares whether you come back again or not.
If anything, hearing comments like that makes their day. They would LOVE to tell you fuck off, and fuck your $670.
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Damn right. Their choice is simply this: 1) sell me the mkv file or 2) don't sell it to me because you're obviously not trying to run a business, so I'll have to get the file for free instead.
I'm watching a standard format file, period. That is what is going to happen, and nobody other than me has any say in that at all. Creators, you can either be a party to the transaction to get that file, or not.
DISNEY, ARE YOU OPEN FOR BUSINESS YET? No? Ok, maybe I'll remember to ask again in a few years.
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I wish they would offer a reasonably priced "season pass" for shows. Then I could say buy a while season of Andor, watch each episode as it comes out, and just download the files instead of having to install their stupid app. Or at most one app to stream all of it.
I know they want me to "discover" the other stuff on their service, but the way to do that is offer the first episode for free.
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my vote is pirate everything until streamings start to do that, all with mostly the same (yes, new shows can be exclusive for x time, but them shared by everyone... this applies to all platforms) and people choose what works better for them and is cheaper.
but no, they want everything, so the response is that they get nothing, pirate everything until they break
I would be happy to pay one reasonable fee to be able to watch everything without ads or interruption... until then there's piracy.
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Me too. I have a Google Keep doc where I can easily add a note about movies I hear about from reviews, etc. Then use Justwatch to see where they are streaming.
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So you basically want cable-tv back?
I don't see it happening. Music isnt like TV, most people don't watch stuff more than once, or if they do its years a part, when they decide "you know I might like to see Deep Space Nine again"
Nothing being tied to a specific night of the week, or time of day has pretty much killed the water-cooler social aspect to TV, and that has nothing to do with the UIs of the streaming services.
The reality is there is just to much TV to watch. Few shows are really 'good enough' to
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Music isnt like TV, most people don't watch stuff more than once,
Good point.
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Because that solves your problem, not theirs.
Moviefone? (Score:1)
The pining for Moviefone really undermines their messaging, to the point where I think it can be dismissed entirely despite the general idea that media browsing UIs for streaming services suck.
First, there's the "OK, boomer" aspect of Moviefone. I'm in my mid-40s and never once used the service, but maybe I'm an outlier.
Then, there's comparing Moviefone and the newspaper listing showtimes for the 5 movies showing near you, to the listing of hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of pieces of media in a f
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I'm 54 years old.
The only time I've heard of MoviePhone before now was in a Seinfeld episode.
I've certainly never used it.
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Boomer here (the real 1965 and prior demographic, not a LARPING GenX'er) who never heard of Moviefone despite decades on da interwebz. I don't do dead tree papers either.
If it's worth watching it's worth pir8ing.
Learn from music biz (Score:2)
They've had similar-song-matching and similar-style-preferences-matching algorithms for music for a few decades already. Can't video borrow such concepts from the music industry?
Or do intellectual-property issues screw that all up? Music has generally agreed to standardized compensation rules allowing almost any station/stream to play any song as long as compensation rules are followed. Video should get their act together and do the same. Stop thinking local and petty.
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No it's all about the "algorithm" which is just a method to push the content they want at you it was never about what you want to watch.
All the streaming services have moved to the "top 10" shows/movies/etc thing which is absolutely not based on user preference but about what they want pushed.
Unprecedented milestone? (Score:5, Insightful)
The entertainment industry has achieved an unprecedented milestone: more film and television content exists today than at any point in human history.
Really? An unprecedented milestone?
Every day since the invention of film & TV has seen more content exist than any previous day, so exactly how is this a "milestone," or, indeed "unprecedented" ?
Who wrote this drivel?
Re:Unprecedented milestone? (Score:4, Funny)
We're just lucky they took out the...
"Sure, I can add some emphasis and hype to your article. Here's one example..."
from the ChatGPT 4o content they published. AI should really start getting by-lines for some of this shit.
Re: Unprecedented milestone? (Score:2)
Thankfully, I stopped watching everything after Altered Carbon S1...
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LLM probably. A lot of drivel comes from people in general, and LLM's are trained to pump out just as much drivel as the average writer.
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The entertainment industry has achieved an unprecedented milestone: more film and television content exists today than at any point in human history.
Really? An unprecedented milestone?
Every day since the invention of film & TV has seen more content exist than any previous day, so exactly how is this a "milestone," or, indeed "unprecedented" ?
Who wrote this drivel?
"Who wrote this drivel?" - slate . com. It was total shit 10 years ago, when I stopped reading, and it has not improved
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Every day since the invention of film & TV has seen more content exist than any previous day
Except for July 9, 1937, where the storage room of the 20th Century-Fox burnt and Fox's complete archive of silent films 1932-1937 was lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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And tomorrow will be a new milestone. And the day after. And after ......
lol
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You must be relatively young. Back before the days of streaming, we had the challenge of checking through all of the TV networks and cable channels to find what new stuff was going to be coming out that looked interesting, but at the same time, the majority of them had VERY VERY little content that was original. Netflix having an insane amount of original content made it the go-to for streaming in the modern era, and while it doesn't offer quite as much, there's still a lot of content there. Amazon Pr
scheduling (Score:2)
> The industry eliminated simple discovery mechanisms like newspaper listings and Moviefone's telephone service
No, the industry eliminated Scheduling. Without a schedule what is there to print?
I haven't used a Roku in about a year or so but the last time I did it was able to search across streaming channels pretty well.
I really miss Netflix DVD (Score:5, Insightful)
Somewhere early on in the video rental business back in the 80s, there was established a legal precedent that production companies couldn't forbid rental of anything they'd released on video. That carried over to DVD. Eventually we had Netflix DVD, which was superior to video rental stores because of its gigantic selection. Usually (though not always) what you wanted to rent was in stock. Yeah, there was a two day (or so) delay between deciding to watch something and getting to watch it, which we don't have with streaming. But one subscription got you pretty much everything.
Alas, the open renting thing did not transfer over to streaming, so now you have to subscribe to n different services to be able to get what you want on a whim -- undermining at least part of what streaming promised. And, stuff moves between services all the time. This is even before we talk about how crappy the discovery tools within one stream service is.
It was a sad day when Netflix DVD closed down.
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Alas, the open renting thing did not transfer over to streaming...
Actually, for a while, NetFlix was a single-source for streamed movies from pretty much every studio, and for a single, reasonable subscription.
However, corporate greed always trumps the consumer, and so we've ended up with each producer siloing their own streamed content, and demanding their own subscription.
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I tend not to watch a series until I know that either, it's s limited series, with a real ending, or it has more seasons.
Netflix has screwed itself by cancelling popular series after the first season and training users to wait to see if there are later seasons.
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The studios forgot to check whether streaming actually works.
Maybe for short TikTok videos. Or episodes of Ow! My balls.
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Redbox was good while it lasted too. I don't know how their system actually worked, it could have been entirely algorithmic but it felt sort of curated. Whatever it was, it worked because you could pick some no-name direct to disc movie you've absolutely never heard of and it'd turn out to be pretty damn good.
Vs what we have on Prime video for example, which seems to lack the ability to surface movies you haven't heard of that also don't suck.
Intentional Obsification (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the streaming services have gone out of their way to make it difficult for the user to find content that they want, in favor of showing them content the streaming company WISHES they would want. Whether it be through algorithmic manipulation, or outright bought positions in the interface on startup, getting to the content you want should not be a difficult thing to achieve, but it became difficult enough for me that I no longer use any subscription based services, and rarely use the free services with commercials because the commercials seem to take over every bigger / important episode of any of their shows.
At some point I would think companies would understand that there is a need to provide something the users / purchasers / subscribers want, or there is no point in paying for a service at all. This is a universal thing, not just streamers. Look at computer operating systems today, updated to shove in features no one asked for in forced updates. Or automobiles, with subscription based features that used to be included in the up-front price of the vehicle. And these are just a couple of examples.
Value (Score:3)
Things of value are usually rare. The amount of "entertainment" is ever increasing, and thus becoming cheaper and cheaper. Creating MORE isn't going to help.
And with AI starting to be used in the Creation process, that will lower the costs of making it, and start making it widely available to more people in the creation process.
This ends in a death spiral of more and more "entertainment" with less and less perceived value, chasing diminishing returns. I suspect that places like OF will make quick end once AI girls are able to do everything by prompts on the fly for their "users".
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They need to make more, to keep people subscribing.
I cancelled Disney+ a while ago, because of their fee increase (I was an annual subscriber). It was easy to do too, since there was nothing new that I wanted to watch.
Recently, I subscribed. Then I binge watched all 12 episodes of Andor over 2 days, and then cancelled. It was $15 or something, which I thought was fair for 12 hours of entertainment.
Not sure when or if I will subscribe again, but there is NO chance, if they don't produce new stuff.
Use an indexer. Here's how: (Score:1)
1. SONARR (tv show finder) uses TVDB to find shows. It can then autofeed
2. SABNZBDPLUS (downloadaer). It can use various sources like bittorrent, usenet archives, etc to fetch the show and then
3. Jellyfin, Plex, Emby will serve those out to your browser, Roku, Apple TV
PROS:
- It's all automatic. All you have to do is find the show and choose your resolution settings and it will find episodes as they are
- It's service agnostic. It finds downloads, not which network originally aired them. No more Googling
If you have a XUMO TV... (Score:1)
Millennials can't code (Score:1)
These apps are all abysmal and seem to have learned 0.00% from the last fifty years of software development.
Even worse, most of the movies/television is just bad, stupid, or what I think kills most of it, basically near-clones of similar stories.
I opted for a middle path, which was to watch Forensic Files when I needed a quick break but otherwise, touch grass. Go outside. Take a walk. Make a boat out of scrap lumber. Read a book. Write some code for fun. Set up a Raspberry Pi to automatically upload ambisex
Apple TV Aggregation (Score:1)
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Roku does fairly well at this too. You can search in the app and it will show the list of free/paid options and one tap will launch it on the box.
That's great when I know what I want to watch. When I don't know, Netflix's old recommendations engine was excellent. I had rated something like 600 movies and TV shows on the web site during the DVD days and they carried that information over so the algorithm recommendations were spot on. Now, they just want to push their own self-produced stuff. They don't e
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Roku does fairly well at this too. You can search in the app and it will show the list of free/paid options and one tap will launch it on the box.
It does, but just this week, I did this and it launched the last episode of the series, not the first.
Here is a job for Super AI Agent Man! (Score:2)
Garbage, yes. (Score:2)
>"Tim O'Reilly describes "every single interface" as "complete garbage except for Netflix's"
No, Netflix's is garbage as well. Any interface that has tons of huge photos and rows of horizontal scrolling is just trash.
There are many reasons I cling to my TiVo (set to the traditional interface) and ridiculously overpriced cable service . It is always ready to use, nothing to load or sync. I can scroll through lists (not huge photos) of what is available to record or has been recorded. I can rate things
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Can't you still get list views on Netflix by dicking with the URL? With specific categories, even?
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Interfaces Full of Rent/Buy Content (Score:3)
What I hate is how all the streaming services fill up their interface with shows that you have to pay extra for. No, I don't want to add another streaming service, so I don't want to see Hulu content in Disney+. Prime is probably the worst, as they're trying to get you to subscribe to numerous other services, as well as rent or buy anything they don't include.
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Yes! It would be great to have a "hide all rentals" user preference.
But that solves your problem, not theirs.
Have not owned a TV in a long time (Score:2)
Blacklists, filters and all that. (Score:2)
What we really need within streaming platforms is blacklists.
The home screens of streaming giants try shove as much of diversified content as they can because exposing greater numbers of shows brings them more money.
What I want as a customer, though, is to be able to systematically filter out all the crap so that I'm left with the stuff which I actually want to watch.
What we also need is category filters that would allow us to sieve content on the high level and eliminate stuff that I'd never watch in the f
Re: Blacklists, filters and all that. (Score:2)
Afterthought:
Another one would be allowing us to make already watched show disappeared.
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Imagine the outrage when people use that filtering to hide all shows starting black people and homosexuals.
Re: Blacklists, filters and all that. (Score:2)
I've got nothing against people of colour. Being a wanker spans across all races.
But yeah, I've got zero interest in gay content. Again, nothing against gay people, I'm just not interested in such content myself at all, and definitely filter it out.
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This is the same with everything online.
I like BlueSky because, unlike Twitter, it allows me to literally put in "Musk" as a blocked term and then I don't see content with that term in it. I have absolutely zero interest in watching sport, ever. So why even bother wasting bits trying to show me any if I know that and tell you that?
But nothing online really works like that. Even on BlueSky, I want it to OCR the images and apply my keywords there too, because people just post images of text headlines and t
Re: Blacklists, filters and all that. (Score:2)
So... When are we starting our own streaming platform?
My take... (Score:1)
Streaming anything has be corrupted in to a much worse version of the terrestrial/cable TV mess. In addition to the mentioned things above, all these media companies and services have sucked up sooo much IP and then only dose it out slowly spoon feeding you things. Also you ever notice that there are some kind of temporary exclusive distribution deals going down? It's like they round robbin content so much you have to try and track it down and hope you already pay for what ever it is on.
Also Media companie
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Like how hard could it be now to make some sort of FPGA device that sits in-between the HDMI output and the TV and uses some sort of onboard AI to detect commercials/audio spikes and adjusts them.
Hard enough that you don't quit your job, create such a device, lobby congress to require the government to send one to anyone who asks for one and make billions of dollars
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What problem does that solve for the provider?
Can you think of at least five problems that it creates for the provider? I can.
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As much as you people bitch about monopolies and "anti-trust", do you really not see be issues with what you propose?
Maybe the system can run on the one OS available, running on a computer built by be one manufacturer available, accessed via the one web browser that is available too.
Not just discovering is a problem (Score:2)
I have a Disney+ subscription and a few days ago ... I pirated Andor. It seems that the Disney+ app on windows only streams in 720p. Also Edge only streams in 720p despite offering DRM. So Disney blocks anything on windows to prevent piracy. Why can I not watch content I pay for?
Naturally that works as well as any other anti-piracy measure so I have some nice 4K HDR rips of Andor on my PC now which I can watch in peace.
more film/television content exists today...crap (Score:2)
Broken consumer software (Score:1)