alt Hacker NewsWe are worse than cable pricing at this point from what I can see.
It's absurd that piracy is the _best_ user experience. 1 app, 1 place for your content, no licensing deals to worry about, no outrage pulling old episodes, local streaming, the list goes on.
You literally cannot pay (legally) for a better experience, and that makes me sad.
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I really like AppleTV, and find it to be a much better experience than pirating ever was. For one, the resolution is always great, secondly, I don't have to know what I want to watch, and third pretty much everything on there is good. My habits have changed though, I don't spend nearly as much time watching tv compared to the college days.
Movies are expensive to make, and watching them on streaming gives almost no money back to the studio. The intention is that if you want to watch a movie, you should pay the $5-10 it costs to do so on any of a number of platforms. Then you get the great user experience of putting any movie you like into the search bar and pressing "play", and the studio gets appropriately compensated. Putting a movie on a streaming service is a way for studios to double dip, to get a smaller amount of money from people who don't care which movie exactly they watch. If you have a particular movie in mind to watch, or don't like the fare on whichever service you're subscribed to, you should be paying a la carte for movies instead. If you aren't, don't pretend it's some moral stand and not just you being a cheapskate.
How is that absurd?
Of course with piracy you can have all the content available everywhere forever.
How do you expect a law-abiding company to match that with content they don't own? Unless we abolish copyright.
...and no pre-roll or mid-roll ads, since just about all of the streamers are going to ads in every tier.
Exactly this.
Streaming services have become the worst of all worlds.
As an EU citizen, even tho I pay for Netflix and Prime, I cannot access most of the content there as even tho it exists on the service because it's not available in my country.
Amazon prime has 2 good shows and just a bunch of D-tier movies or some 35+ year old ones. It's mostly worthless.
Netflix region locks a whole lot of content or removes it after some time. I can't watch some great movies and TV shows because "oh we don't have rights for this region".
Meanwhile, piracy provides a user experience that not just lets me access all of their content - one I'm already paying for - anywhere, but also lets me access movies and shows that would otherwise not be found anywhere else, including regional movies and short movies.