mendax writes:
A New York Times op-ed reports:
A team of web designers recently released an astonishingly innovative app for streaming movies online. The program, Popcorn Time, worked a bit like Netflix, except it had one unusual, killer feature. It was full of movies you'd want to watch. When you loaded Popcorn Time, you were presented with a menu of recent Hollywood releases: "American Hustle," "Gravity," "The Wolf of Wall Street," "12 Years A Slave," and hundreds of other acclaimed films were all right there, available for instant streaming at the click of a button.
If Popcorn Time sounds too good to be true, that's because it was. The app was illegal - a well-designed, easy-to-use interface for the movie-pirating services that have long ruled the Internet's underbelly. Shortly after the app went public, its creators faced a barrage of legal notices, and they pulled it down. But like Napster in the late 1990s, Popcorn Time offered a glimpse of what seemed like the future, a model for how painless it should be to stream movies and TV shows online. The app also highlighted something we've all felt when settling in for a night with today's popular streaming services, whether Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, or Google or Microsoft's media stores: They just aren't good enough.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SuddenOutbreak on Friday March 28 2014, @01:49PM
And THIS is where they get you again. It may be on Netflix. It may be on Amazon Prime. Maybe it's only on Crunchyroll, Vudu, iTunes, or something else yet again. The Roku, for example, has a really nice interface for searching across multiple services, but you have to PAY for these extra services to see the film.
As the articles mention, Spotify, iTunes and Google are just three of such music services that have just about everything, and differ mostly on interface and device support. They all have roughly the same music. Netflix came the closest to "Spotify for Video", but not quite good enough.