alt Hacker NewsWhich streaming service was that on again
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> The original promise of streaming was simple. Everything would be available whenever you wanted it. You could sit down in the evening and binge an entire season without waiting a week for the next episode.
That's not how I remember it. Streaming services never had everything. The promise was: there would be something you would enjoy.
There are two reasons why this isn't working for us:
1. They've cut costs and over-optimized on engagement and now frequently a streaming service will literally not have anything you want to watch.
2. We've started expecting "must-see" shows and movies. You want to watch The Pitt, and then are mad that you need to get HBO or whatever and can't just watch it on Netflix. Perhaps you could browse Netflix and find something you'd like, but you have your heart set on a specific show.
Obviously (1) is a failing of the streaming providers, but I think (2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good.
What the courts did to the studios back in the '40s should be done today. Your company can either commission/produce original content OR you can be a distributor OR exhibitor. Only one.
While it shouldn’t be necessary to resort to third party services to resolve these issues, it’s worth noting that JustWatch will tell you where a movie can be found and Letterboxd (among others) will give you a somewhat more clunky unified watchlist.
Usually Justwatch should be able to tell you where something is available. However I will note that it's remarkably common for something slightly old to just not be available anywhere. You cannot watch Das Boot in my region on any service so far as I can see. So I guess you loan from the library or buy DVDs off of ebay or something?
Streaming in 2026 is a disaster, I'm happy to pay but piracy is just easier.
> There are probably a few ways to improve things. Cross-platform search should be standard by now. A shared watchlist across services would help.
Apple tried this with the TV app on their AppleTVs. It was supposed to pull all your subscriptions into one interface, searchable, with tracking and watchlists and all that good stuff. One unified app to all your content.
Then Netflix said they weren't going to play ball, so most others refused too, and now it works with only like 1/3 of streaming services out there.
This feels like such a tired subject now. That's not to say don't complain, it's just surprising that we still haven't hit any kind of breaking point with this. I thought we were going to have a big die-off followed by re-consolidation. But somehow this is sustainable? Who is supporting all these stupid services?
Any show I've googled has a widget at the top right showing me where it is, if it's included in my current subscriptions, and how much it costs without one.
It's been getting confused lately about arrangements like "Paramount+ via Amazon Prime", but it still works pretty well.
For a time, it was popular for movie trailers to end with a domain, often of the form "${ $TITLE }film.com", which would take you to the marketing site for that release. Nowadays there's a whole TLD specifically for movies.
It's a shame that isn't a norm for you to be able to plug a URL into a reader that consumes application-specific RSS (à la podcast clients) for the express purpose of giving notifications when that film is available (either for rent or by subscription) on a new platform.
(Ideally, of course, the media itself would be self-hosted, so you could paste the URL into e.g. VLC and encounter a platform-neutral way to negotiate payment directly with the distributor (or not and just get embedded ads—à la podcasts) and then you're off to the races.)
Poob has it for you.
We rejected cable tv, which bundled in different content provider packages and plans into one interface, in favor of streaming services, and now are in the process of reinventing cable.
IMDb shows this. But also, since the author of the blog post is seemingly German, there's http://werstreamt.es (who streams it) that does exactly that. Showing you what streams were (flatrate vs on demand).
Netflix never had everything. I seem to remember watching a skit 10 ish years ago that joked that Netflix only had bad movies.
The ads are what get me.
Justwatch.com had this info
IMDB shows this info.
I recently watched a YouTube video from Answers in Progress where the creator made a site that does this using Hostinger:
arr me matey
This is what URIs were for. It's too bad we don't have nice things like book://9781250781253 or movie://le%20samourai or song:// or livesports://
If only there was dozens of services for this exact issue. this took me less than a few minutes with classic non-LLM search:
It's on my media server. Forever. Where did it come from? Content negotiations are not open to public scrutiny. Thank you, good day.