How convenient! - eviltoast
  • Artyom@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    There was a time when almost everything was on Netflix. As a consumer, having all my content in one place for $10/mo is awesome, but according to capitalism, it is a problem that needed to be fixed.

    • Landless2029@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      The crazy thing is loads of people stopped pirating and paid for a streaming service that was affordable, worked, met thier needs.

      Now it’s all splintered with corporations wanting a piece of the pie.

    • MBech@feddit.dk
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      4 months ago

      It really did hurt my ressources for pirating though. After not downloading anything for years, finding the right sites and proxies again was hard.

      • hitmyspot@aussie.zone
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        4 months ago

        Except that the technology has improved and now Sonarr and radarr take all effort out of the equation.

    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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      4 months ago

      The part that’s wildest to me is that nowadays with all the ways services are trying extract more value from their users (ads, increasing rates, reducing library size, restricting access to features, etc ) plus the DRM, the media consumption experience of just having the media files is so much better than the experience one can have through most of the streaming services or even DVDs with all of the unstoppable prerolls

      Whether you rip your own DVDs (legally murky) or you’re just watching a bunch of public domain silent films, or pirating, it’s really hard to beat just having the .mkv and opening it in your player of choice.

      About the only way to compete with that is one decent service with good quality, no ads, an extremely wide collection and minimally invasive DRM

      • DrainKikoLake@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        Every time I head to the second-hand store I pick up a couple new CDs and DVDs. It’s great! I’m paying max $3.99 apiece and I’ll own them forever.

    • FrChazzz@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Movies were on Netflix, TV shows were on Hulu. It was great.

      Once Netflix started on their whole “half of all our offerings are going to be original content” is when it began to go downhill. Literally no one (aside from executives) was sitting around going “man, I can’t wait until Netflix starts making shows and movies!” They were a service. That’s all they ever needed to be.

      • illegible@discuss.tchncs.de
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        4 months ago

        I think they were forced into it when the other companies decided they could make some of that sweet netflix money, so they stopped licensing to netflix and built their own services. Netflix had no choice but to build their own content.

      • markovs_gun@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Idk I know I was pretty excited for Netflix’s early original content because the proposition was like “HBO, but on the internet and you can watch it any time” and they were doing big budget stuff. Things only went south when they didn’t keep up the HBO level quality and ruined their reputation to the point where I see “Netflix original” and immediately think “garbage TV”

    • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      according to capitalism, it is a problem that needed to be fixed.

      I mean one service having a monopoly might not be that great. Good thing about capitalism could be that if the service got shit, there’d be competing alternatives. Doesn’t work out that way often.

      • Obi@sopuli.xyz
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        4 months ago

        Somehow that’s kind of how it’s worked out for music streaming, the music industry is fucked in many other ways but you can choose any of the services and you’ll have more or less access to everything, with some small differences.

  • Taokan@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    Everyone wants to run a subscription service, until they have everyone on a subscription. Then instead of celebrating that they won capitalism, they go and start with the exclusive extra addons and upgrades. Because unfortunately no company in the history of companies has ever said that’s it, we’re making enough money, let’s relax.

  • BradleyUffner@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Or even better, “even though you pay for the ad free subscription, this video is only available with ads”.

  • 𝕾𝖕𝖎𝖈𝖞 𝕿𝖚𝖓𝖆@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    DVDs are dirt cheap, plentiful as fuck, don’t have DRM bullshit to have to deal with, last for decades when stored properly, and still look pretty damn good with deinterlacing. Plus, they don’t run any of the risks associated with piracy. Am I allowed to copy my DVDs onto my hard drive? That may be a legal gray area. But can they see that I copied my DVDs to my hard drive? Of course not. And I’m not making my ISOs and MKVs available to the world for download.

    Spend 4 bucks on a used DVD. Give her the ol’

    dd if=sr0 of=~/Videos/Movies/Title.iso

    And keep the disc for basically forever. Copy it again if something happens to your file. EZPZ. Plus, it’s cool to own a physical thing imo.

    One last thing: DVDs come with subtitles. I have a hard time understanding spoken words. I like to read my movies as I watch them. Makes it easier to know what’s going on without cranking the volume to 11. Speaking of which, the menu for the Spinal Tap DVD is excellent.

        • Boomer Humor Doomergod@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          It would be awesome to have a service that releases those commentaries as podcasts you can sync up with the content. I’ll never forget the BSG director’s cut podcasts by Ronald D. Moore. They’d come out about a week after the show and he’d sip a whiskey and smoke some cigarettes and it felt like we were just chilling together.

      • dalekcaan@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        You can rip just the part that’s the movie. Most DVDs have the ads before the menu, so on the disk it’s a separate file. There are probably better alternatives, but I use a program called MakeMKV that lets you open a disk and only save the videos you’re interested in. IIRC there’s a free version that lets you rip DVDs and a paid version that also does BluRays (assuming you have an optical drive that can read them,of course). I bought it probably about a decade ago and was still able to recently activate a new copy using my old activation code.

    • undeffeined@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      I thought it was weird when I saw a Disney + billboard with The Last of Us. I just sail the high seas but I remember the HBO intro on that shows season 1. For people of pay for these services its really shitty to have a show they like jump to another provider.

  • CPMSP@midwest.social
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    4 months ago

    I think we should be able to co-op a digital library… Say, the Internet archive seems to be just that!

    Why is it under constant attack? Oh yeah, greed.

    Why aren’t we able to digitally host a communal library where each owner can “buy in” access by contributing a library?

    Like a digital replication of each piece of physical media owned by a person?

    • Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      4 months ago

      You mean private trackers? Fr those who are against piracy seem to be missing the point. For me it’s about refusing to pay into a corrupt system where the creators get very little of what they make. The agencies get the majority. Which is why I pirate from Ubisoft, buy from Humble Bundle, steal from the corporations, purchase from the independents, donate to charities and exploit the greedy.

      • Manalith@midwest.social
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        4 months ago

        I’ve been out of school since 2017 so I don’t know for sure, did publisher really drop textbook prices to around $20 during the pandemic? None of the books I needed to buy were under $100.

  • slappypantsgo@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    And it’s never anything in demand either. It’s always some random movie you came across on Wikipedia when you were scrolling through some actor’s filmography, and a minor interest was sparked. These companies create no value and hoard wealth and power. The whole copyright regime is tyrannical.

    • markovs_gun@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      99% of these problems would be solved if copyright lasted a reasonable amount of time. IMO copyright should last for 50 years from the date of publication or the life of the original creator, whichever is longer. That way the author has control over their work during their own lifetime, and like an author’s husband won’t just be screwed if his wife published a blockbuster book and then dies soon after, but we don’t have Disney milking shit from the 1920s for a hundred years. It’s absurd to me that I have to pay Amazon $4 to watch Citizen Kane, a movie that came out before my grandparents were born, and that’s the only legal way to watch it. Literally nobody who was involved in making that movie is still alive to benefit from it, it’s only people making money from doing literally nothing.