This entire field is completely messed up. One of my favorite movies this year is from India, I don't usually see Bollywood movies but Manikarnika rocked. It opened in January and now, it's been out on Amazon Prime since Saturday:
This only drives piracy -- it obviously has been ripped and it is available on torrent.
Other side of the coin, I subscribed to Amazon Prime to watch American Gods and it takes more than 24 hours for the latest episode to get to Canada from the USA. It is literally faster to drive across the border, record it and drive back. That's insane. Oh and there's no indication of when it drops. People posted the question for UK and there's simply no answer.
I honestly can say, I tried to move away from piracy -- I have been pirating things since 1985 -- but when I look at https://twitter.com/awealthofcs/status/1110254374192889857 and the availability, I despair and just want to give up. I have the money but having all of these are just annoying. Every service has its own interface and problems. Like, you can't Chromecast Amazon Prime unless you cast the browser tab and that sucks quality wise. And yes, quality! Amazon Prime is not always 1080p but what I torrent is always 1080p and never degrades. Netflix is better quality wise for sure, it was the first I subscribed to watch their Marvel stuff... but I am really not keen on having eventually eight or a dozen different services to search when I just want to watch a movie and deal with the quirks of each.
Piracy is a service problem and these guys are making the service worse and worse every day.
Ps. try searching Roku stick on Amazon.ca , the first result is "Roku® Streaming Stick | Portable, power-packed player with voice remote with TV power and volume | US version – Not intended for use in Canada".
Sports is even worse, wanna watch the game for your favorite sport? Gotta have that one special subscription! That shit thrives on exclusivity deals. (Super Bowl ads, anyone?)
When I lived in the UK I signed up for an out-of-market subscription for NHL, it was something like $50 and I could watch any game from any broadcast (they always do a home and away broadcast) and they’d block out most of the ads because it was out of market and they hadn’t sold the ads there. Now the UK does air some nhl games, particularly during the playoffs, so how’d I do it? Used a vpn in like Peru or somewhere that wouldn’t give two craps about hockey. I paid for it, but still had to jump through hoops to watch it. What I time to be alive.
Whoever figures out the Netflix of sports, wins. I’m calling it.
Australia has (maybe? mostly?) figured this out with a subscription service called Kayo.
It is $15 a month and contains basically every sport my friends who like sports watch.
I'm looking forward to seeing it collapse into a pile of garbage when the governing bodies of various sports catch on and try to "extract value" from streaming.
> I paid for it, but still had to jump through hoops to watch it. What I time to be alive.
When I travel in the EU, several sites refuse to show because of GDPR. My favorite paid porn site doesn't even explain anything just goes to an "under maintenance" page. I can't buy a cinema ticket for the time when I'll be home because the purchase page simply doesn't load. All of this goes away by SSH'ing to my home and using the OpenSSH SOCKS proxy. Or by using a VPN.
Totally true. This is why I got excited for Apple TV+ for a minute. A single interface to access to all of these services is totally worth my money.
I often thought about building something like this, but always came to the conclusion that the potential legal problems are not worth it. justwatch.com is a life saver when it comes to figure out where to get the content from. +1 for justwatch.com!
They already do. Apple TV app happily shows me Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc etc content for me to watch. Their suggestions on things to watch also include content only accessible from those services. My Netflix and Hulu (and HBO and others) are even billed to me via iTunes too, so this isn’t a huge shift in reality. Almost everything but the more polished UI (and not needing to wait on the provider’s app to load, looking at you Hulu with your terribly slow app) is available today in fact.
? It's available on Amazon Prime in the US. In Hindi, Tamil 7 Telugu. With English subtitles. Smart TVs these days allow Amazon Prime so why would try Chromecasting from your computer?
Some people (like myself) refuse to trust the typically poor security practices of Smart TV manufacturers and never connect them to the internet.
Or better yet, try to purchase the few remaining non “smart” TVs or have started using computer monitors instead of TVs to get a TV smaller than 40” and without smart TV garbage in it.
https://www.justwatch.com/ca/search?q=manikarnika
In Canada.
In the USA?
https://www.justwatch.com/us/search?q=manikarnika
Not so much.
This only drives piracy -- it obviously has been ripped and it is available on torrent.
Other side of the coin, I subscribed to Amazon Prime to watch American Gods and it takes more than 24 hours for the latest episode to get to Canada from the USA. It is literally faster to drive across the border, record it and drive back. That's insane. Oh and there's no indication of when it drops. People posted the question for UK and there's simply no answer.
I honestly can say, I tried to move away from piracy -- I have been pirating things since 1985 -- but when I look at https://twitter.com/awealthofcs/status/1110254374192889857 and the availability, I despair and just want to give up. I have the money but having all of these are just annoying. Every service has its own interface and problems. Like, you can't Chromecast Amazon Prime unless you cast the browser tab and that sucks quality wise. And yes, quality! Amazon Prime is not always 1080p but what I torrent is always 1080p and never degrades. Netflix is better quality wise for sure, it was the first I subscribed to watch their Marvel stuff... but I am really not keen on having eventually eight or a dozen different services to search when I just want to watch a movie and deal with the quirks of each.
Piracy is a service problem and these guys are making the service worse and worse every day.
Ps. try searching Roku stick on Amazon.ca , the first result is "Roku® Streaming Stick | Portable, power-packed player with voice remote with TV power and volume | US version – Not intended for use in Canada".