Streaming media is failing consumers on its initial promises. With the current focus on increasing its revenue, we are facing price increases and smaller catalogs. That’s not factoring in that there are so many more services than at the start.
I first experienced streaming media back in 2007. I was one of those that was really into DVDs. I collected a lot. I had the Netflix 3-disc plan. Back in 2007 or 2008, I had just gotten the first disc of season 1 of Hereos. I popped it in on a Friday and it was so addicting. There was no way I couldn’t not finish the show as quickly as possible. Netflix was offering it through its Watch Now service, which would eventually just become Netflix. We were given 1 hour of streaming for each dollar spent on the monthly plan. I had enough to binge season 1 and it was done by Sunday. The future now seemed amazing.
As I thought about what it’d look like in the future, we’d have the entire catalog of all movies and TV show available to us in an instant. Boy was I wrong!
This post isn’t going to focus on the entirety of the on-going enshitification1 of streaming because I’ve bowed out of the game. The only services I have are ones included in other bundles (Apple TV+ is part of Apple One and I’m grandfathered into HBO Max with my AT&T plan) but I don’t use them.
I could live with the number of streaming services. I used services like Just Watch to find where to watch things. As I was trying to find movies, I’d notice they were disappearing or moving around with reckless abandon. Nothing was sacred. I considered everything ephemeral. There one minute and gone the next. It was made more official, when Vulture reported that HBO Max was still pulling things from its service without warning, and I took notice.
At least I could take solace that this dealt with streaming only. Wrong. Last year, Sony and Discovery got a lot of flack when it was reported that 1,318 seasons of Discovery shows that people “bought” would be removed from being viewed on PlayStation. Eventually, they backed down, but the line shifted forward. Eventually someone was going to cross it. I figured it was going to take a little more time, but just this week news broke that Crunchroll (also owned by Sony) was not going to bring content that customers bought with the Funimation app to it from the merger of the catalog.
We should have known this was going to happen. We trade control and agency for convenience, and then have to suffer. Thankfully, as I said I no longer am in the game.
My setup is ideal for me. It’s not for all people. I purchased a Synology NAS with four drive bays. I loaded it with four-16 TB drives. I’m running Plex software. It monitors folders on the NAS and any video file I put in there goes into my Library. I purchase, rent, or borrow Blu-Rays and use MakeMKV and Handbrake to rip and encode files that I place in my Library. It requires a lot of effort to maintain, but I know if a movie or TV show disappears from the library it’s because I did it. Control will always require some effort, and we each have to make the call for ourselves.
