> 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.
>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.
>(2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good.
I don't think this is it. People just want to be able to watch things without too much hassle and without paying too much money. Some people will enjoy following the latest trend, but there are always many more people not watching any particular show than are watching it.
The fact that torrents make it so much easier to find what you want shows that there's nothing technically difficult about this. It's all caused by stupid profit incentives which make the consumer experience so much worse than it needs to be.
You 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.
But the sense that it had "almost everything" was more a halo effect of the old dvd-by-mail business, I'd say? I do agree with the general idea that streaming is less satisfying than ever, I probably get more mileage out of my completely free (thanks to my local library) Kanopy account than I do Netflix these days, just because it really does have a wider range of stuff to watch.
It 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.
Netflix had “everything” because it was the first (commercially successful) mover on streaming, and as a result it was pretty much the only game in town for a long time. Every other producer HAD to be on Netflix if they wanted to reach the streaming audiences.
It was only after their success did all the other producers feel comfortable that this was the future, started building their own apps, and then had to wait for their exclusivity contracts they had given to Netflix expire.
There was a lot of fear around what would happen to Netflix when those contracts would expire, and that’s how we started getting their originals like Stranger Things.
What 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.
Usually 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?
While 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.
As 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?
Thanks 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.
> 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.
Most 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.
Like 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.
The 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.
And 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.
Honestly, 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?!!
Any 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.
For 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.)
This 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?
"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.
> 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.
IMDb shows this. But also, since the author of the blog post is seemingly German, there's http://werstreamt.es (who streams it) that does exactly that. Showing you what streams were (flatrate vs on demand).
We 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.
Yeah sure. My point is that I have to leave the streaming apps and use third-party services in the first place. If finding where to watch something requires another app or website, I’d argue the ecosystem itself has a UX problem
Any 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…" :-(
Letterboxd 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.
It’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.
> 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.
>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.
>(2) is on us a little bit. Cultural monoculture is not good. Following the herd is not good.
I don't think this is it. People just want to be able to watch things without too much hassle and without paying too much money. Some people will enjoy following the latest trend, but there are always many more people not watching any particular show than are watching it.
The fact that torrents make it so much easier to find what you want shows that there's nothing technically difficult about this. It's all caused by stupid profit incentives which make the consumer experience so much worse than it needs to be.
You 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.
But the sense that it had "almost everything" was more a halo effect of the old dvd-by-mail business, I'd say? I do agree with the general idea that streaming is less satisfying than ever, I probably get more mileage out of my completely free (thanks to my local library) Kanopy account than I do Netflix these days, just because it really does have a wider range of stuff to watch.
It 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.
> 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.
Netflix had “everything” because it was the first (commercially successful) mover on streaming, and as a result it was pretty much the only game in town for a long time. Every other producer HAD to be on Netflix if they wanted to reach the streaming audiences.
It was only after their success did all the other producers feel comfortable that this was the future, started building their own apps, and then had to wait for their exclusivity contracts they had given to Netflix expire.
There was a lot of fear around what would happen to Netflix when those contracts would expire, and that’s how we started getting their originals like Stranger Things.
What 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.
Usually 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?
Justwatch for me is just showing "Stream this or pirate it?"
I love JustWatch and most of the time it's given me the answer I need.
While 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.
As 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?
If you put your unified watchlist on JustWatch, they will even notify you when something you want to watch becomes available.
Ok, I didn’t know this, thanks
Streaming in 2026 is a disaster, I'm happy to pay but piracy is just easier.
Thanks 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.
> 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.
Most 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.
I find that it's actually more annoying than it is useful
Like 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.
It's on my media server. Forever. Where did it come from? Content negotiations are not open to public scrutiny. Thank you, good day.
The 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.
We need an updated version of this:
https://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg
What subtitles does it have? Any you want, regardless of where you are, where your residency is or your citizen status.
And 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.
Honestly, 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?!!
The real answer is always Jellyfin.
https://app.trakt.tv/
https://reelgood.com/
Any 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.
How does Google know what subscriptions you have?
I have AppleTV+, and subscribe to a bunch of services, which it aggregates, but it's still a big fat mess.
For 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.)
This 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?
Poob has it for you.
"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.
> 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.
IMDb shows this. But also, since the author of the blog post is seemingly German, there's http://werstreamt.es (who streams it) that does exactly that. Showing you what streams were (flatrate vs on demand).
We 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.
It's always on The Pirate Bay. That's the streaming service everything is on.
Justwatch.com had this info
Streaming is impossible without the efforts of things like JustWatch. Especially when you want to find old movies for the kids.
Netflix 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.
stremio.com
IMDB shows this info.
I 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://toomuchmedia.online/
arr me matey
This 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://
If 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://www.justwatch.com/
https://streamsearchup.com/
https://www.wheretowatch.stream/
https://streamfinder.co/
https://findmystreams.com/
https://lookupvod.com/en
Yeah sure. My point is that I have to leave the streaming apps and use third-party services in the first place. If finding where to watch something requires another app or website, I’d argue the ecosystem itself has a UX problem
Or the search in the middle of the screenshot that tops the article.
Any 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…" :-(
Letterboxd 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.
Have you used any of these? Most of them are awful and not useful at all. JustWatch is alright but is succumbing to enshittification.
I'm going to guess there's basically one real one and the rest are scraping it to present with more ads.
also https://werstreamt.es where the URL is probably only easy to remember for Germans
I can't even name the absolute fastest way to watch literally anything almost instantly because I'd be downvoted to oblivion lol