I'm old enough to remember the promise that cable TV was paid so you wouldn't have commercials...it lasted what, 6 months? The channels without commercials cost extra...le sigh
its so tiresome to have all these services constantly made worse. these days it feels whenever a new thing comes out, it has about two or three years before it's run into the ground in pursuit of the almighty dollar.
and this kind of thing is also happening to movies/tv shows/video game franchises. it feels like no matter how good it starts, you only get (at most) 2 or 3 sequels before the executives get their hands on it and run it into the ground. sure there are exceptions to this, but they are few and far between. and its becoming even more common for shows/video games to simply disappear if the parent company decides to remove them from online stores/streaming platforms.
all around, it just feels like things are becoming less and less permanent
Honestly this is a nice feature for some kinds of shows. Sometimes I don't want to watch a show from the beginning in order for certain kinds of shows. The only problem is this feature is coming as streaming services are fracturing and becoming less and less usable.
If they do it like Paramount I'm all for it. I like just throwing on the Star Trek channel rather than deciding what episode of which series I want to watch. That's part of why I get so much use out of Plex's Live TV channels. Only difference is paramount doesn't have ads on their channels
I've kinda wished services would do something a bit like this for a while:
One channel for new stuff, based on your recommendations—just gives you a load of random tastes of shows without you actively picking through things
One for stuff you rewatch. For example, if you've watched always sunny or peep show through a couple of times, put random episodes on this channel for when you just want something in the background
Minus ad breaks, I missed this aspect of content consumption. Choosing to watch a random episode of a random show just doesn’t happen and I missed being able to just “see what’s on”. I spent a fair amount of time setting up random “channels” I can tune into that play random episodes from tv shows on my media server and it’s great.
Lol all this time these media companies have had to change their models to align with market forces, we've watched them hem and haw, drag their feet, etc. this step shows they never wanted things to change at all, and they have the power and the money to keep change from happening. finally we see them at their end game, harnessing the Internets power for something so tiny. To them, the only benefit to this technology is cutting out the middleman and b bringing able packages to you without negotiations with a cable service.
Their minds are so small, but this and worse is their greatest dream. It's a terrible, venal world that small minds lead us to isn't it?
Telecom companies existed before the internet and have made every effort their television fiefdoms would have the right to own it as well.
Then again the only bastion of defense against this has been a parade of old ass people who don't own computers and were handed a smartphone 15 years ago but only want campaign donations in exchange for not understanding the problem.
So it really wasn't much effort at all to turn the internet into TV 2.0.
So same old broadcast thing, but with internet, a framework designed to send a different data to each user.
Meaning you will be wasting way more energy with the same stream going in different packets to people.
I am sure they'll somehow make it terrible and anti consumer, but i honestly think that there is convenience in simply tuning in on a channel and having the choice made for you what to watch.
There are two types of watching TV, consciously watching something with purpose and just
Both have their place and i'd imagine that time wise the simple content takes up the larger share of people's usage. Not sure how it is for others, but i for one often times can't watch great movies on back to back days and need to decompress after
Disney+ has a problem where they are very strong but in very specific genres. I go for the Marvel and Star Wars stuff, but am not interested in kids or teens stuff. Depending on the details, this could make it nicer by filtering out the stuff I will never be interested in