Why Movie Streaming Services Are Unsatisfying — and Will Stay That Way

mendax sends this excerpt from a New York Times op-ed: "like Napster in the late 1990s, [torrent-streaming app Popcorn Time] offered a glimpse of what seemed like the future, a model for how painless it should be to stream movies and TV shows online. The app also highlighted something we've all felt when settling in for a night with today’s popular streaming services, whether Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, or Google or Microsoft’s media stores: They just aren't good enough. ... In the music business, Napster’s vision eventually became a reality. Today, with services like Spotify and Rdio, you can pay a monthly fee to listen to whatever you want, whenever you want. But in the movie and TV business, such a glorious future isn't in the offing anytime soon.

According to industry experts, some of whom declined to be quoted on the record because of the sensitivities of the nexus of media deals involved, we aren’t anywhere close to getting a service that allows customers to pay a single monthly fee for access to a wide range of top-notch movies and TV shows.Instead of a single comprehensive service, the future of digital TV and movies is destined to be fragmented across several services, at least for the next few years. We’ll all face a complex decision tree when choosing what to watch, and we’ll have to settle for something less than ideal."

Newsgroups anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sorry, but I have never heard a good argument to use something other than the Newsgroups I've been using since the early 90's.

Currently I pay $8.00 per month to Astraweb and run NZBGet on a little NAS box with front ends Couchpotato for Movies and Sickbeard for Shows. They are internal web pages running on the NAS and you can set a show and movie you would like to see, set the quality you'd like and forget till you get an email that the job is DONE!

At that point the file is LOCAL so none of that buffering BS!

THAT's the glimpse of the future!!!

I see Netflix stutter at my friends' with relative poor video quality. And who wants a limited/changing/shrinking(?) selection anyways?

Yes, some might say that NG's are 'illegal' but downloading is NOT in many county's.. So don't use bit torrents since that's uploading too, but use NG's instead. Combined with SSL access to super fast servers and retention of over 1500 days what's not to like??

Besides, it NG's have music too... I have never doubted where I want to spend my $8/month

Cheers!

Re:Um. WRONG.

[luckymutt]

Most academy award winners? Not present.
Most Oscar winners? Not present.

Those are the same thing.

Re:Two words

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I pay for an Apple TV device when I can load XBMC on an old computer and have the same kind of thing for free, or when I can turn on my Blu-Ray player and connect to a lot of other free streams?

Because you don't like fan noise in the living room?
Because you'd like to use a simple 5 button remote?
Because you don't want to pay for your "economy" in power bills?
Or, as the article was saying, because you want availability to just released content?

I'm not sure what your rationale is but I'm assuming it must be perverse

Re:Um. WRONG.

[kylemonger]

Well, there is this thing called buffering where you store data for a while so that if you need again it's still available locally. Storing 30 seconds of video on either side of the current position and making it randomly addressible isn't too much to ask. In fact Netflix does do some buffering, but the interface to it is so bad that it hardly matters. A simple seek backward still takes too long.