I guess it's time to to ditch Netflix. The shows aren't very good anymore. Many (most?) now have ads, and you know those will keep increasing until they've pushed it to the very edge of customer tolerance. And for some reason they refuse to explain, they're updating their app to prevent offline downloads.
Put this all together and it's really not worth it anymore. Any recommendations for what to replace it with? Or have all the streaming services gone down the same enshittification road?
What kinds of shows do you and your wife enjoy? Bribox, as mentioned above, has a deep catalog of fine shows. You could go quite a while just watching David Suchet's run as Hercule Poirot.
The Apple TV catalog is relatively small but very high quality. Lots of great Sci Fi and now three seasons of the amazing spy show, Slow Horses with Gary Oldman.
We gave up on Prime after they wanted to charge more for staying commercial-free.
I loved Slow Horses! Just finished DI Ray on PBS. I am a big fan of British and Australian shows so I have both Acorn and BRITBOX. My all time favorite is Foyle’s War.
It depends on what you like to watch. Hulu is really good if you want a nice library of older shows and all the FX series are available immediately (The Bear, Shogun, Fargo, etc.). Nothing will really beat Netflix when it comes to the sheer volume of its library.
You can get most of Hulu with a Disney sub now.
Hulu now has commercial too. Unless you pay to upgrade. Apps will turn out to be worse then TV shortly, I know of no DVR to skip commercials. Play-on works on Windows but I use mostly Apple and have zero idea how to play stuff off a PC to a TV. Seems like quite the hassle
Criterion is the one
I agree.
I don't think I could give up Netflix. I don't see ads I guess because I have a premium subscription or something. And it's totally worth it to pay more to avoid ads if you are going to stream.
IMO one of the big problem with TV series released to streaming services is that a) they are typically quite dark because our culture confuses darkness of theme and tone with quality, and b) they are all very soap opera-ish. To keep you binging they show never gives you a satisfactory conclusion to any storyline, or at least not for years. I tried streaming the Recruit and at first I thought I liked it till I realized they were never going to resolve anything. They were just going to keep upping the stakes.
One of the few Netflix shows that did not let me down recently was the Night Agent. Just a fun thriller that is not afraid to actually bring the story to a conclusion at the end of the season.
But this is why so many people are bringing up BrittBox and talking about the old Star Trek content. We really need shows that have satisfying storylines again. Life is stressful enough. How stressful do you need your TV watching to be?
Also this is why sports is great and why I can't cut the cord. Yes you can stream sports but the experience is so much worse because you can't easily flip channels during commercials when streamingl
>our culture confuses darkness of theme and tone with quality
This, 100x this.
I would also recommend PBS Passport. Lots of interesting stuff, especially the "Walter Presents" items. We are moving toward a strategy of pausing subscriptions and going back to them once a number of things we want to see in a month are available.
Passport only has about 5% of the Walter Presents that is on MHz Choice. You are missing out on a lot.
We watch mostly Crunchyroll, so...
And Netflix. We share Disney and Max, too.
How about Nebula? It's like YouTube but has no way for smaller artists to enter.
A library card?
I recommend replacing it with HBO Max. No commercials (yet), they have a ton of content, great original content, movies, some live sports and some live CNN.
And they finish their shows, unlike Netflix and most of the others.
Aside from Westworld.
Amazon Prime has the most content overall, I think, with ads now unless you upgrade to ad-free for $3.17 a month. Beyond that I only sign up for a service when they have something new to offer. Like The Bear starting this week, I'll re-up on Hulu no ads for $17.99 a month. Then cancel at the end of the month or series.
I don't think it matters... it's a losing proposition no matter which way you go. Us old 'uns remember 3 channels of free TV, with an acceptable number of commercials, and most baseball games broadcast for free. The movie theaters at the time all featured commercials telling us to BEWARE OF PAY TV because it was going to end civilization. Then we all subscribed to HBO anyway. At least it had no commercials. And then the baseball games started to broadcast some of their games on.... {shudder} PAY TV and we had to watch on radio. Or on TV, because the audio was fine but the picture was scrambled. And slowly but surely, PAY TV started to cement its place in American culture and we started to get used to paying for things. But at least there were no commercials. Until...
Well, that's just the way things go. Eventually, everything will be broadcast on some medium you have to pay for, and they'll show you commercials anyway. So replace Netflix with anything you want. The commercials are still going to get you. Because we should have listened to that nice fellow in the movie theater commercial.
Cary Grant DVDs should be at your library. You really don’t need anything more.
I just subscribe for a month when there's something I want to watch and cancel straight away so it doesn't do a recurring payment. Makes more sense than having a subscription I rarely use.
They're all headed down the same road. All the suits who just destroyed their cable businesses are now pursuing the same policies with streaming.
We subscribe to Amazon Prime's service (as part of Prime), HBO, Apple+ and NetFlix. It still cheaper our old cable bill was. Taking inflation into considering makes streaming today even cheaper.
I agree that a lot of the shows produced for NetFlix are just schlock.