Technology

Personally, that's one of the reasons why I haven't bothered to watch a TV series for almost a decade now. Between this, the constant crackdown on piracy, the outrageous prices for original media, and the constant moral issues from popular culture icons and media CEOs, I'd rather sleep in my free time

“What should Ie watch?” is the question not because the quality of the offerings is so good, but because generally the offerings are absolute crap. Free current B movies are a lucky find, the rest is all old C and D list crap. You can’t even find highly regarded classics like Schindler’s List or Shawshank Redemption for free most of the time.

It’s unbundling all the way down. Charge for the service, charge for the quality of service (# of devices, 4k or not), then charge for the better content.

It’s like the author never used the search function on a set top box. Most will allow you to add a program to a master queue and then will show you what channel(s) the program is on when you want to watch it. And unlike cable, you don’t have to call to add the channel when you don’t have it, or to cancel when you no longer want it.

Streaming services need to be federated, so there is a central search for content, and services are paid seamlessly for what's watched on their platforms. The customer barely needs to know who delivers the content.

That's why I ask myself "What do I want to watch?" and shop for physical option day or two before. When watching a movie once a two-three weeks like me it's cheaper and I can keep it.

(Now someone suggest just pirating, but I don't pirate movies that promises to be good)

"what do I want to watch" is stupid hard, cmon. I spend most of my time watching the roku screen saver.
How? If it's not on my plex it's probably on a friends.
I'm tired of this expensive fragmented bullshit.

I don't know much, but Stremio does a fairly good job listing streaming services for anything searched

I've heard a lot about setting up a Plex or a Jellyfin server locally, but from what I can tell they are just media storage platforms and in order to watch anything you would have to add your own content. In this age of digital content, it is very unlikely for a simpleton like me to go out and purchase hundreds of movie disks separately and manually load them into my CD drive to even have a fraction of the catalogue these streaming services combined provide. Also torrenting really isn't a viable option for me as I personally use a free tier Proton VPN which doesn't allow P2P, and even if I did get a proper one, I would still be limited to availability of seeds for movies I want to watch, which may or may not exist depending on the popularity of the said movie. I currently use a niche streaming site to watch my movies without any issues. Are self hosted plex/jellyfin servers really for a person like me?

Roku has a great voice search which works across all of the installed apps. I can just ask it for a movie, and it tells me which services have it.

Honestly, the only reason I have Netflix in the first place is because it came bundled with my ISP. Can't cancel it without phoning them up and I'm much too lazy to do so.