I don't like this new era of streaming

The pluses outweigh the minuses for me, but there is an effect on eyes and head i am finding, and am cutting down on my watching plans because of that physical discomfort.

I can't imagine that the movie studios don't want to find a way to put the genie back in the bottle, like how horrifying it was to them when we all found out how easy it was to copy VHS tapes. In 1960, the only way to see a movie was in a theater, with a ticket. Now that movies "escaped" and we can find all sorts of legal and illegal ways to see them, part of the money is shut off. I don't think either us or they know just where this ends. The technology won't go away and short of some sort of authoritarian takeover of electronics, neither will "illegal" viewing and copying.

Thank godness for screen recorders and uploaders I'd guess that the ease and low cost of streaming has made illegal downloading far less common and so not much of a problem like it was some years back.

I think human behavior plays a role.. If one was at a theater, they wouldn't be able to minimize the YouTube video, pause, get a bite to eat, check the phone 80 times, etc.. As long as others aren't disruptive, I think I'd digest more of it.



Nowadays, I won't even watch a movie if I'm not well-rested. I'll even try to start the AC on early enough so it's cold by the time I start the movie, so I don't have to hear this.

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I probably feel the same way.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

Well, its like, people without much skill or budget or people who dont take the craft seriously are now suddenly able to make their own movies. They dont have to buy film and the prices for HD cameras keep falling. Not much investment or training is required anymore. So, naturally, theres going to be a bubble like there was with the dotcom boom, that will eventually explode. The professionals must keep their own creations out of reach and seperate and really show what makes them successful. I believe it will be all sorted out within the next 10-20 years but in the meantime theres going to be some confusion and a lot of imposters fooling young starlets and young actors into their fold for good and bad.

A physical product is the one and only way to ensure lifetime availability of what you purchased into your library and also guarantee preservation of the film on some format. Diamonds are forever, digital files are not.

Do digital files degrade or wear out over time?

I don't think they do?...Any computer knowledgeable people out there to help answer?

Technically all hard drives wear down, yeah. But they're relatively easy to backup and copy, so if you have a file on more than one drive and monitor their status you're usually pretty safe.

Ah, always back up, good advice! Back in the day I had a hard drive die that took a whole bunch of vacation photos with it

Digital files naturally decompose on molecular levels, bits disorganize and the coding corrupts. This applies to all digitally stored data on hard drives, thumb drives, and solid state drives. I think that it was stated that digital data is good for up to 20 years. To keep a file from corrupting from inactivity simply open the file if it is read only or run the program if it is software, this refreshes the "charge" inside the ''cells'' that hold the data. You can set your PC to access all files each time you insert a thumb drive, this serves the same purpose.

I think of it like putting a poster in the sun. Over time the image fades until the paper is blank. Same thing happens with digital bits in your hard drive.

DVDs are only as good as one’s dvd player. It’ll be too bad if dvd drives phase out totally as they’ve done with computers, which no longer have a drive. Which I find very annoying.

DVDs arent forever either and have a relatively short life of 20-30 years max. There needs to be a high quality storage method that can keep a movie replayable for 100 years. Something tough and enduring.

Yeah, it's called keeping it in a DVD Case and you shouldn't have a problem going forward plus, it wouldn't hurt to clean the discs too along with the Blu Ray Players

I like the convenience of streaming any tv show at the touch of a button.

I doubt you can just stream "any" show anymore - OP already mentioned how shows are now scattered across many different services and then there are the shows that simply aren't available anywhere.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Every generation has to reinvent half the things the previous ones invented and relearn half the things the previous ones learned.

We have now more or less reinvented cable, albeit with a few modest convenience upgrades.

We sure got to burn through a lot of venture capital cash though for a few years watching all that stuff super cheap, though. Wheeee.

If it works for you great, you're lucky.

I only recently started streaming shows and it's been a bag of mixed results. Example, I wanted to watch all 5 seasons of the original The Odd Couple. It's not like it's an obscure show from the past and yes it's available to stream. I was able to stream it for free, with commercials, on Pluto. Only when I was done watching all 5 seasons I went back and compared the episodes count to what IMDB had listed and for some reason there were dozens of missing episodes on Pluto.

I searched and seen it was on pay-for-streaming on Paramount+ which I'd used in the past to stream all the episodes of the original The Love Boat and without commercials. So I re-signed up for Paramount+ only to find out that The Odd Couple was still missing a bunch of episodes and despite the fact that I was paying to stream I still had to endure a ton of commercials in each episode, ugh. After four days I cancelled my subscription to Paramount+.

Then I went old fashion, I borrowed the The Odd Couple from my library....Voilą now I have all the episodes from seasons 1,2,3 and 5 along with special features. Unfortunately somebody had lost season 4 of The Odd Couple and my library only had one copy of it. So now I'm scouring the depths of foreign websites looking for the missing episodes of this American classic show. Why do things have this damn hard.

Your Odd Couple story reminds of what I thought was a great mystery in that I could never find the fourth season of The Twilight Zone. Tried on different services until I found it on Freevee. Turns out all the S4 episodes were an hour long instead of the usual 30 minutes. I'll have to get around to watching it one of these days. If only for comparisons sake.

I'd used Freevee and liked it. For a free services the commercial breaks were small and quick. I didn't know they had the 4th season of The Twilight Zone. One of these days I'm going to revisit all of TZ episodes. I last watched TZ a couple of years ago, great show! One my favorites.