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56% Positive

Analyzed from 949 words in the discussion.

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#streaming#https#com#netflix#justwatch#services#available#something#watch#may

Discussion (32 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

r0ckarong•about 3 hours ago
It's on my media server. Forever. Where did it come from? Content negotiations are not open to public scrutiny. Thank you, good day.
prasadjoglekar•about 2 hours ago
We need an updated version of this:

https://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg

linksnapzz•about 1 hour ago
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.
JohnMakin•9 minutes ago
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.
advisedwang•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours ago
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.
mkozlows•about 1 hour ago
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.

yjftsjthsd-h•24 minutes 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.

BryantD•about 3 hours ago
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.
kej•about 2 hours ago
If you put your unified watchlist on JustWatch, they will even notify you when something you want to watch becomes available.
weetii•about 2 hours ago
Ok, I didn’t know this, thanks
tormeh•about 2 hours ago
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?
atonse•about 1 hour ago
I love JustWatch and most of the time it's given me the answer I need.
mrhottakes•about 1 hour ago
Streaming in 2026 is a disaster, I'm happy to pay but piracy is just easier.
fckgw•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour ago
I find that it's actually more annoying than it is useful
mrhottakes•about 1 hour ago
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.
surround•18 minutes ago
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.

deejaaymac•about 1 hour ago
https://app.trakt.tv/

https://reelgood.com/

cxr•about 1 hour ago
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.)

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drc500free•about 3 hours ago
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.

svelle•about 1 hour ago
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).
zanecodes•about 2 hours ago
Poob has it for you.
Apocryphon•20 minutes ago
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/

fnord123•about 3 hours ago
Justwatch.com had this info
e40•about 3 hours ago
IMDB shows this info.
LgWoodenBadger•about 1 hour ago
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://
jubilanti•about 1 hour ago
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

zellyn•about 1 hour ago
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…" :-(
anderber•about 1 hour ago
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.
mrhottakes•about 1 hour ago
Have you used any of these? Most of them are awful and not useful at all. JustWatch is alright but is succumbing to enshittification.
blitzar•about 1 hour ago
arr me matey