We are in peak shopping season for dedicated streaming devices from Apple, Roku, Google, and Amazon. There are seasonal sales, they make for a relatively affordable gift, and streaming services tend to get many new subscribers, spurning streaming hardware buys.
My advice: if you’re buying a dedicated streaming box, most should buy an Apple TV. Alternatively, if you are happy with your streaming life but have a few quibbles (like a missing service app on your setup), spend the bare minimum necessary to make your streaming experience tolerable. That latter scenario may mean spending nothing, bypassing existing hurdles by watching select content on a different device or casting from a phone (via Airplay or Chromecast) to your TV.
All other streaming options from Amazon, Google, and Roku are generally a substandard compromise. Yes, you’ll save a solid $80 to $100 in the short run. But you’re also shortchanging the longevity of the device, app availability and quality, and a host of other benefits unique primarily to Apple’s streaming box:
Over Warner Discovery’s Q2 earnings call, the new media behemoth announced plans to merge HBO Max and Discovery Plus as a single service in 2023. While we’ve got a solid year to evaluate if CEO David Zaslav’s bet will be a financial hit, early signs are worrisome.
Sticking to safe, proven programming was always what I expected from the new, post-Netflix dip “content perspective” era. But early signs point to Zaslov and his team taking Warner Discovery into extreme, creatively bankrupt directions. Their actions risk driving away their existing subscriber base.
On the day of the earnings call, low performing TV series and movies disappeared off HBO Max to save residuals. Zaslav and friends also canceled a nearly finished $90 million superhero movie – Batgirl – as a tax write-off. A tone deaf presentation simplified HBO Max as “male skew” when some of the service’s biggest breakouts like Hacks and The Flight Attendant reach much broader audiences.
After a decade of rapid growth, Netflix took a tumble over the past quarter, for the first time losing more subscribers than it signed up. Wall Street’s reaction has been swift, with the market slashing Netflix’s valuation to less than half of its value from a few weeks prior.
Many schadenfreude-fueled takes revel in watching the king of streaming take a hit, but Netflix’s downturn won’t improve film watching habits or shake up streaming’s ascendance. The availability and discoverability challenges on streaming – clunky user interfaces, ruthless algorithms – won’t improve. Mega budget streaming sites will survive. What will change are the type of shows and movies that streaming sites buy, produce, and green light going forward.
Over the past several years, movies – specifically those that aren’t part of a blockbuster franchise or mega IP – don’t have the audience they used to. Compare four critically acclaimed dramas helmed by well regarded auteur directors, released two years apart: Licorice Pizza and The Power of the Dog in 2021, Parasite and 1917 in 2019. The difference is stark, with the 2021 films performing comparatively weak at the box office and anecdotally having far less attention among my friends and across social media.
Movies are aging into the rock music or baseball of entertainment, still enormously popular among a dedicated core audience, but with declining interest as other forms of media (primarily TV) fill the gap. The twin forces of the pandemic and the economic heft of massive entertainment conglomerates have only accelerated the phenomenon.
Several times this year, I’ve written about the decline of theaters and the rise of streaming, exacerbated through the effects of the pandemic. While there has been a recent theatrical comeback for big franchise properties, smaller budget indies haven’t enjoyed the same success. It’s harder than ever to find movies that aren’t a gigantic four-quadrant blockbuster on the big screen. For the exception of those fortunate enough to live in a film hub like New York or LA, moviegoing is a bifurcated experience: Marvel, James Bond, and other mega family-friendly IPs play at every cineplex around town, transitioning over time to heavily marketed streaming, VOD, and Blu-ray opportunities. Everything else gets quietly dumped off direct to VOD or streaming.
That void in theatrical availability is a lost opportunity that streaming can’t replicate. Powerful sound on a giant screen can give an enveloping, immersive quality to a film. In an increasingly distracted world where multi-tasking is the norm, theaters are a rare setting optimized for focus on a particular movie image. Audience reactions – laughter, clapping, gasps, cheers – provide a unique character.
Popular streaming services like Netflix make it challenging to find films older than a few years. As these services increasingly dominate our movie watching time, fewer will be watching older movies. The net effect accelerates an already on the rise movie monoculture dominated by Disney, DC, and Fast and Furious. Fewer films that aren’t blockbuster franchises get made.
The problem starts with streaming service UI patterns, most of which have the same opening interface: a big highlighted promo area up top, followed by long rows of thumbnail content segmented into categories. As I wrote earlier, categorization in the rows can feel arbitrary. Navigating through a single row requires too much horizontal scrolling. In addition, the promo area dominates the visual hierarchy but rarely offers more than a single movie or TV series at a time.
So streaming UI makes browsing dicey for any film. Considering older films tend to be a fraction of the content on the opening page, they, in turn, become exponentially more difficult to find.
How we get from one TV episode to the next on your streaming service of choice requires finesse. The right design pattern saves time through less menu navigation once you reach the end of an episode. But too aggressive of a yank to the next show generates a hurried feel, giving you barely a breath to process what you watched before zooming off to the next show.
The services I subscribe to today – Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus – take different approaches to this next episode design challenge. All but Disney Plus have an algorithm that detects when you’ve finished an episode, generally the moment the closing credits begin to roll. At that point, UI appears to suggest moving on to the next show. This feature ensures I get the correct episode when I pick back up the series later.
Disney has no next episode detection and no corresponding UI at the episode’s natural endpoint. Continuing the “latest” episode of a show usually drops me midway through the previous episode’s credits. The net effect means I have to manually browse to get to the next episode.
The pandemic has upended movie watching. Our theaters are now our homes, with streaming services like Netflix and HBO Max our de facto movie watching hubs. Even long after COVID-19 is behind us, film distribution will not revert to the way it was in 2019. Brick and mortar theaters stay in shambles. Premium VOD will be untenable. Subscription services increasingly dominate.
Paradoxically, a movie watching landscape under the control of new technology can make finding content to match your tastes more difficult. Algorithms are not the answer. Instead, you’ll have to use some proactiveness and legwork to find your next great film.
That’s because almost every streaming service makes hunting for good content an ordeal. So much content can appear at once. Most services are intentionally obtuse with the details and it’s hard to know when a service adds or removes movies. Categorization can feel vague, misleading, and manipulative. A service will happily pay inflated prices for critically acclaimed festival winners and then proceed to bury them off the home page.
With Wonder Woman 1984 debuting here in Canada as a $30 CAD rental, I can’t help but consider the premium video on demand (VOD) market on shaky, unstable ground. Long term I suspect it’s more of a stopgap action out of studio desperation than viable future for movies.
At a glance it shouldn’t be this way. Premium VOD is a great value alternative to theaters. While VOD means the loss of a theater level screen and sound you avoid the time and coordination of commute, loud audience members, and pay a lot less. Here in Toronto, a $30 CAD rental matches two tickets at $15 a pop. Add in transportation costs and expensive concessions and there’s a significant savings with premium VOD. Also, by swapping out the theater middlemen in exchange for streaming distributors like Apple and Amazon, studios ensure a higher percentage of box office income from every sale.
The Criterion Channel has upended my expectations of what a streaming service can be. Smart curation changes everything in a way that makes Netflix feel flat-footed.
It shouldn’t have turned out this way. Years ago I expected the powerhouse streaming trio of Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu to be must have destinations for movie content. The ingredients were all there: multi-billion dollar war chests, A list talent, and big tech to drive smart recommendation algorithms. But today it’s a struggle to find a decent movie to watch on any of the three big services. “Netflix original” has become the modern equivalent of a made for TV movie of yesteryear. Occasional highlights do pop up (Roma, Moonlight, You Were Never Really Here, Annihilation, Minding the Gap), but they are few and far between, buried under mostly lukewarm content.