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from the pray-I-do-not-alter-it-any-further dept.
It's difficult to imagine that Friends, a show that ended 15 years ago, could be of any real importance to a modern streaming giant like Netflix.
In fact the sitcom, which features a bunch of 20-somethings living together in a time before streaming was even invented, is US Netflix's second-most watched show.
Today, Netflix announced that it's poised to lose its rights to broadcast the series to its original parent company, Warner, which plans to launch its own streaming service, HBO Max in the first quarter of 2020.
The blow follows another announcement in June that Netflix's number one series, the US version of The Office, is also being snatched back by its creators, NBCUniversal, to be broadcast exclusively in the US on its own yet-to-be-launched streaming service.
Old media, analysts are noting with no small amount of surprise, is suddenly bringing the fight to Netflix, and it looks like Netflix could be the one that gets knocked out, or at least very knocked around.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday July 13 2019, @12:00PM (1 child)
MAFIAA and friends will wage a bitter war against fully loaded Kodi and related "pirate" services (including the websites and servers that streams are scraped from).
Kodi with plugins is still tough for plain folks to use (I know because I've set it up for a few). But when it does work, at its best, it's kind of like Netflix, except free. Which is terrifying for MAFIAA members (Netflix joined in January 2019).
You have to maintain a Kodi setup to keep it working. You'll see weird update failure messages, plugins that work great but later break (possibly due to DMCA or legal threats), and video sources that don't work, buffer slower than real-time, have reduced quality, have hard-coded Turkish subs, lack working English subs where needed, etc.
If there was an easy-to-find "app" that installed a robust, idiot-proof, fully-loaded Kodi instance onto a streaming device or smart TV, that could threaten legit services. If it's like it is today, many people will just give up and pay for 1-3 of the streaming services (which could still undercut a cable subscription). But it is plausible that the plugins will get better and the video sources will benefit from new codecs and cheaper bandwidth (cheaper to provide X Gbps of streams, with a stream of a given quality/resolution requiring progressively less bitrate with H.265, AV1, and so on). Hardware should also improve. Raspberry Pi 4 can supposedly decode 4K @ 60 FPS (and Kodi/LibreELEC probably benefits big time from that 4 GB of RAM), new streaming sticks can decode 4K, and more smart TVs could make separate streaming sticks/boxes unnecessary. The Kodi software and LibreELEC are also improving.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by legont on Sunday July 14 2019, @12:07AM
I prefer old school downloading not only because the quality is better, but because it forces me to choose what I want to watch in advance as opposed to mindlessly staring at the screen. I do realize that degrading the consumer is an important goal which forces them to promote all kinds of instant satisfaction schemes.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.