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Which streaming service was that on again?
- gkbrk 2mo agoIt's always on The Pirate Bay. That's the streaming service everything is on.
- r0ckarong 2mo agoIt's on my media server. Forever. Where did it come from? Content negotiations are not open to public scrutiny. Thank you, good day.
- prasadjoglekar 2mo agoWe need an updated version of this: https://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg
- embedding-shape 2mo agoWhat subtitles does it have? Any you want, regardless of where you are, where your residency is or your citizen status.
- pooploop64 2mo agoAnd the subtitles themselves will be beautifully authored making full use of features like using color coding and positions to show who's talking. Sometimes you'll even get Area 51 technology where text appearing on signs will be edited to appear translated using only subtitles.
- monk_grilla 2mo agoYeah this is truly crazy subtitle tech and it always blows my mind how they make it so seamless.
- pippy360 2mo agoThe thing that got me back into pirating is having to pay extra for 4k. When every bit of extra enjoyment is taxed it just kills my joy. Like a lot of people in this thread I really would much rather just pay for a good product than pirate. Thanks to steam I haven't pirated a video game since I was a teen.
- drc500free 2mo agoAny 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.
- jimbokun 2mo agoHow does Google know what subscriptions you have?
- e40 2mo agoIMDB shows this info.
- BryantD 2mo agoWhile 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.
- kej 2mo agoIf you put your unified watchlist on JustWatch, they will even notify you when something you want to watch becomes available.
- weetii 2mo agoOk, I didn’t know this, thanks
- NetMageSCW 2mo agoSo will Reelgood which I migrated to because JustWatch started feeling annoyingly advertising filled and it’s Apple TV App was just broken.
- acheron 2mo agoAs far as "third party service shouldn't be necessary", is it that different from getting the TV Guide in the 80s or 90s to find out when a show was going to be on TV?
- al_borland 2mo agoThe difference is people likely aren’t subscribed to every streaming service, so looking up what service a movie is on it a little like a slot machine, where you spin the wheel and hope it lands on a service you have. You could say that’s not dissimilar to a person having basic cable, while the TV Guide also shows all the premium channels, but in this still feels different. In a way it’s what people asked for, but not really. With cable, people were bothered by paying a high price when they only watched a few stations. They wanted the ability to pick and choose for a lower price. Now we can pick and choose, but there is too much overlap in content, so it ends up being more expensive to get it all. It’s not like there is a service for sitcoms, another one for drama, sports, music, etc. They are all trying to do a little bit of everything. This isn’t what people actually wanted.
- fnord123 2mo agoJustwatch.com had this info
- ballon_monkey 2mo agoStreaming is impossible without the efforts of things like JustWatch. Especially when you want to find old movies for the kids.
- advisedwang 2mo ago> 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.
- user17847392650 2mo agoYou remember incorrectly. The first real commercial on-demand streaming service to gain traction was Netflix, and it exploded in popularity precisely because it did have "almost everything". One reasonable price, practically everything worth watching. That was the original promise.
- mkozlows 2mo agoIt really wasn't. Early streaming (like 2012-ish, after cord-cutting was possible but before it was mainstream) had Netflix and Hulu as the two major services, and so anything that was on streaming was on one of those two. But lots and lots of stuff just wasn't on streaming at all. If you subscribed to Netflix back then, you probably subscribed to both the streaming and the disc-mailing plan, because there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2mo ago> there were enough things you couldn't get on streaming, so getting the discs was important to fill those gaps. That's true today, Netflix just misses those gaps outright now.
- fckgw 2mo ago> 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.
- dylan604 2mo agoI find that it's actually more annoying than it is useful
- mrhottakes 2mo agoLike most of Apple's software, it's extraordinarily annoying. It may or may not surface what you searched for, it may or may not deep link into it, it may or may not be entirely wrong. Just a huge waste of time, "free" is too expensive.
- NetMageSCW 2mo agoMost of those issues are with individual streaming providers messing up their implementations of the announcement apps, or showing how terrible their own catalog is (e.g. Hulu wanting to play the Spanish version of the Mentalist) but there is definitely room for improvement- it should remember properly which provider you watched a series instead of constantly reverting to what it thinks is best which is based on the bad data from the other apps.
- jimbokun 2mo agoMost people think of the loss of Steve Jobs passing in terms of Apple product design. However the loss of his talent for business negotiations was at least as great a loss for Apple. He negotiated deals to get almost the entire recording industry onto iTunes. He convinced AT&T to sacrifice control of devices on their network to get an iPhone exclusive. Maybe he would have found a way to convince Netflix to integrate their content into Apple TV.
- zanecodes 2mo agoPoob has it for you.
- tormeh 2mo agoUsually 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?
- atonse 2mo agoI love JustWatch and most of the time it's given me the answer I need.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- MattGrommes 2mo agoJustwatch for me is just showing "Stream this or pirate it?"
- jubilanti 2mo agoIf only there was dozens of services for this exact issue. this took me less than a few minutes with classic non-LLM search: https://imdb.com https://imdb.com https://www.justwatch.com/ https://www.justwatch.com/ https://streamsearchup.com/ https://streamsearchup.com/ https://www.wheretowatch.stream/ https://www.wheretowatch.stream/ https://streamfinder.co/ https://streamfinder.co/ https://findmystreams.com/ https://findmystreams.com/ https://lookupvod.com/en https://lookupvod.com/en
- zellyn 2mo agoAny suggestions on which of these are usable? justwatch.com used to be amazing, but it's increasingly getting enshittified: they seem to be intentionally making their presentation _less_ clear so they can show ads for "similar content available on…" :-(
- anderber 2mo agoLetterboxd has this feature too, but they use JustWatch behind the scenes. I like how they implement it. I can filter a list of movies per streaming service.
- Amorymeltzer 2mo agoiOS-only, but Callsheet (<https://callsheetapp.com https://callsheetapp.com>) is basically "What if the IMDB app didn't suck?" It uses TMDB as the data source. I love the interface, and it has JustWatch info built-in; I use it as my quick access link, so I now only use it to find where things are.
- NetMageSCW 2mo agoI moved to Reelgood.
- mrhottakes 2mo agoHave you used any of these? Most of them are awful and not useful at all. JustWatch is alright but is succumbing to enshittification.
- linksnapzz 2mo agoWhat 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.
- kridsdale1 2mo agoOk. Now two companies with similar board members enter in to an exclusive licensing deal.
- majormajor 2mo agoIf you abuse that it becomes a competitive disadvantage if others don't. The people making and selling the shows wouldn't want to make a deal with a studio who won't put it out for truly competitive bids. That's why you got things like this: Universal (NBC) produced House; Fox aired it. Touchstone/ABC produced Scrubs; NBC aired the first 7 seasons. Brooklyn 99 was made by Universal, aired on Fox originally. Modern Family was made by Fox, broadcast on ABC. (The vertical integration today even extends to exclusive deals with those show-creators to try to prevent that too. Which isn't exactly great for quality either.)
- tancop 2mo agothen ban all kinds of exclusive deals, licensing and buyer/seller agreements. its the most direct anti competitive action you can take but its legal for some reason.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- graboy 2mo agoI've advocated for this exactly. For alcohol it's called the three-tier system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-tier_system_%28alcohol_distribution%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-tier_system_%28alcohol_d...
- cxr 2mo agoFor 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.)
- svelle 2mo agoIMDb shows this. But also, since the author of the blog post is seemingly German, there's http://werstreamt.es http://werstreamt.es (who streams it) that does exactly that. Showing you what streams were (flatrate vs on demand).
- LgWoodenBadger 2mo agoThis 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://
- dasyatidprime 2mo agoThere is an ISBN URN namespace, but I don't know whether anyone maps it to anything. https://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-formal/isbn https://www.iana.org/assignments/urn-formal/isbn
- mrhottakes 2mo agoStreaming in 2026 is a disaster, I'm happy to pay but piracy is just easier.
- readread 2mo agoThanks to Jellyfin + Infuse (on AppleTV), even family and visitors have no trouble using my "streaming service". And I can reach it on the road with TailScale. Takes me laughably little time per year to manage (maybe an hour in a normal year, perhaps two or three relatively "hands on" hours in a year I modify the zfs disk pool in some way) My main motivation for having it is easy access to several things that can't be had legally at all (the best very-close-to-opening-day Star Wars movies in the 4k77/4k80/4k83 series, or uncut Beavis and Butthead episodes, or Northern Exposure with the original music, to pick a few examples) but once you've got it, adding everything to the server is arguably less effort and lost time than using a half-dozen streaming services. I'd much rather pay, I dunno, $50/month or something for a service that had everything on it, but that doesn't exist, so I have this instead. It's a ton better than a pile of streaming services that are still missing most stuff, plus force you to play the ridiculous "which one had this, again?" game.
- al_borland 2mo agoI’m amazed that after watching what the music industry went through, that the movie and TV industries haven’t figured it out yet. Have all the content on all the services, and let people pick which service integrates best with their life. This would dramatically reduce piracy, basically overnight, yet they all keep fighting to try to “win”, but it’s not a winner take all system.
- blitzar 2mo agoarr me matey
- deejaaymac 2mo agohttps://app.trakt.tv/ https://app.trakt.tv/ https://reelgood.com/ https://reelgood.com/
- Apocryphon 2mo agoI recently watched a YouTube video from Answers in Progress where the creator made a site that does this using Hostinger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPw-gDw6Nxk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPw-gDw6Nxk https://toomuchmedia.online/ https://toomuchmedia.online/
- surround 2mo agoNetflix 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.
- JohnMakin 2mo agoWe 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- pooploop64 2mo agoThis 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?
- techteach00 2mo agoI can't even name the absolute fastest way to watch literally anything almost instantly because I'd be downvoted to oblivion lol
- Cider9986 2mo agostremio.com
- pj_mukh 2mo ago"It's just that the ecosystem became too fragmented" Ecosystems are either too fragmented or too monopolistic. Complain, complain, complain. Speaking of monopolistic, just google it guys, google knows where the movies/shows stream, that is your unified interface.
- readread 2mo ago> Ecosystems are either too fragmented or too monopolistic. In this case, it's actually both at the same time! No, for real, that's why it sucks so bad, both of those things are simultaneously problems with the streaming service market. Another poster in this thread has already posted my personal preferred solution, which is to do the same thing we did to movie studios and movie theater ownership for many decades, ending only a few years ago: ban combined ownership of both production and distribution.
- kalleboo 2mo agoThe ideal outcome for users would be like how music turned out. Aside from a few attempts at exclusives, you can get all the music no matter which of a myriad of services you use. If you want to subscribe and stream, you can do that. If you want to own something, you can buy it, DRM-free.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2mo agoI have AppleTV+, and subscribe to a bunch of services, which it aggregates, but it's still a big fat mess.
- outofpaper 2mo agoThe real answer is always Jellyfin.
- mbeavitt 2mo agoHonestly, I’ve gone back to dvd rentals! CinemaParadiso sends me as many films and boxsets as I can handle by post and it’s the same price as a standard Netflix subscription… And it’s in blissfully high bitrate 4k! Anyone else notice that even the high quality options of streaming services are compressed to hell?!!
- Arubis 2mo agoIt’s on Plex. It’s all on Plex. (Or Jellyfin, if you prefer.) Piracy in the 90s and early aughts mostly didn’t solve for price so much as for distribution and availability.
- programmertote 2mo ago> Cross-platform search should be standard by now. A shared watchlist across services would help I have a Hisense TV with Roku interface. I was always able to search a movie and it'll tell me ways to watch. Being a data engineer, I sometimes wonder how that data is collected and aggregated.
- vivzkestrel 2mo ago- i am a huge movie buff myself - my imdb watchlist with completed items runs more than 1000 movies long - my incomplete is another 1000+ movies - i have never used a single streaming service in my life yet - torrented every single one of them - if a movie is spectacular, i ll watch it at the theatre
- burnt-resistor 2mo agoStreaming services need a simple, industry standard JSON search API to enable discovery and search by devices and client and web apps. It shouldn't obscure snowflake code locked away proprietary to each service, or need to be glued together by a third party API or app.
- zombot 2mo agoThe problem is those companies are profitmaxxing, not servicemaxxing. Of course they will penny-pinch until they lost any and all utility. As long as you give them money anyway, they have no reason to change.