Meanwhile, it’s getting harder and harder to focus audiences’ attention on the movies that Hollywood deems most important

Saturday, February 23rd, 2019

Warner Bros. found that viewers with myriad options tend to retreat to the programs most familiar to them:

It’s an experience any Netflix user can identify with: Sitting down to pick out a movie, scrolling through choices for an hour — only to settle, finally, on an old episode of “Friends.”

I must admit that I do find myself scrolling through options for far too long — especially for someone who ends up watching so little — but I definitely do not find myself settling on something old and familiar very often. (Another admission: I did enjoy the original Terminator a few months back, though.)

Just under 500 new TV series premiered last year — compared to 182 new shows in 2002, according to an annual report released by cable network FX. Netflix plans to release nearly 100 original movies and documentaries this year.

Nearly three-quarters of U.S. households already have more than one streaming service like Netflix or Hulu, up from 59% two years ago, according to market-research firm Ampere Analysis; of these households, nearly 42% subscribe to three separate streaming services. And the two biggest Hollywood studios, Walt Disney Co. and AT&T Inc.’s Warner Bros., are preparing their own streaming services, set to launch by the end of this year.

Three-quarters of U.S. households have more than one streaming service? Wow.

Meanwhile, it’s getting harder and harder to focus audiences’ attention on the movies that Hollywood deems most important. On Sunday night, Hollywood will gather to honor the most prestigious movies of the year at the 91st Academy Awards. On Monday morning, executives in Hollywood will likely wake up yet again to the news that fewer people cared to tune in to their big night—just as they did last year, when the telecast lost 6.4 million viewers, or about the population of Indiana.

I don’t normally approve of Schadenfreude

Comments

  1. Kirk says:

    The more ubiquitous something is, the less interesting it becomes.

    Part of this is due to the effect of no longer being able to do the traditional “one-up” thing on people with your oh-so-cool and transgressive entertainment choices–If everyone can find your iconoclastic movie on Netflix or Amazon, what joy can you possibly find in “turning them on to it”, and thus lording your own oh-so-cultured esoteric secret knowledge over them?

    Older I get, the more I’m convinced that my early thesis that about nine-tenths of “culture” exists merely to enable the supposed cognoscenti to feel a frisson of superiority over the rest of us mundanes is absolutely correct, and may even understate the reality of things. Many people seem to gain a sense of power and self-satisfied smug superiority over others, with regards to their entertainment choices and recommendations. Netflix destroys a lot of that power.

    As well, when you couldn’t binge-watch seasons of old TV shows, it was all too easy to put the old ones you remember from your childhood up on pedestals, and make believe they were better than they actually were. Once they’re on Netflix, well… The fact that they were actually crap becomes inescapable, which also tends to put a bit of a damper on your enthusiasm for the current set of crap on offer through the entertainment complex.

  2. ASM826 says:

    I quit watching their awards show when they quit being entertaining and decided to be preachy. I don’t see any reason to watch them tell me how I should think.

  3. Wan Wei Lin says:

    I have never had cable and it’s been over 20 years since I had an antenna. I do like steaming. Even then the tv stays off for weeks at a time. May I smugly recommend a foreign title series? Qin Empire II: Alliance. Chinese with English sub-titles. Costumes excellent, character development good, battle scenes hokey. 45 minute episodes so you’ll know quick if it something you want to watch. Took me 5 or 6 episodes to decide to watch the series.

  4. Sam J. says:

    I use I2P to download stuff. Download it then go to “the Postman” for magnet files(the link comes with the package on the first page). The whole thing is garlic encrypted so no tracking. Kind of like Tor but more secure as everyone is a server and the tunnels change every 10 minutes.

    Takes a long time sometimes but I don’t pay the Pozz. Can be fast if something is popular.

    I liked “Better Call Saul” series. I saw it before “Breaking Bad” which was ok.

  5. Harry Jones says:

    Sturgeon’s Law applies universally. What’s needed is a filter. My thinking is: go on YouTube and search for someone else’s idea of what were the best bits. If the someone else has any taste all. this will save a lot of time.

  6. Gaikokumaniakku says:

    “I use I2P to download stuff. Download it then go to “the Postman” for magnet files(the link comes with the package on the first page).”

    Is there a way to interface I2P with IPFS?

  7. Sam J. says:

    “…I2P with IPFS…”

    It’s my understanding, and I may be wrong, that the capability is there but there’s no software for this.

  8. Gaikokumaniakku says:

    “It’s my understanding, and I may be wrong, that the capability [I2P with IPFS] is there but there’s no software for this”

    I listen to lots of tech wizard gossip. Some like IPFS, some like I2P, some like both, but I still can’t find any integration. I think it should be possible to link to an I2P site from an IPFS page, but that is not really integration: the user would still need to be running I2P to use the link. Thanks for the feedback.

  9. Graham says:

    I know there’s a long tradition of movie critic hyperbole and paid quotes for ads, but when I saw the recent film “Alita:Battle Angel” advertised with the critic’s quote, “This is why we go to the movies”, suddenly I needed a few grains of salt.

  10. Sam J. says:

    “IPFS, some like I2P”

    I2P and IPFS are two different things. IPFS is a system of storing files across the internet like the files on a hard drive but…vastly bigger. From wiki

    “…IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. IPFS could be seen as a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository. In other words, IPFS provides a high-throughput, content-addressed block storage model, with content-addressed hyperlinks.[3]

    The filesystem can be accessed in a variety of ways, including via FUSE and over HTTP…”

    I2P is much more a system of transport of data. You have a serverand client,(on your computer), it sends out for an address. The whole thing is encrypted with the average being three hops,(can be changed), before it reaches the address you requested. Three hops there and three different hops back through different servers in each hop. The servers are the various users in the system. So everyone is using and serving,(mostly).

    I2P has a distributed file system like IPFS called, Tahoe-LAFS,

    “(Tahoe Least-Authority File Store) is a free and open, secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant, distributed data store and distributed file system.”

    but it’s hard to set up. If it was a plug-in in I2P and a little easier to use it would probably be used more. As it is it’s slightly cryptic.

    The key would be to have a distributed file system like IPFS but have it anonymous by running it through I2P. Then you could say set up a forum and have it saved and served by multiple, maybe even millions, of people if it were popular. You would also have a very hard time proving that any one person was serving the data from that forum. Also could be used for most anything, movies, music or any other basic web service. I do suppose that you would want to block JavaScript so that would kill a lot of functionality.

    There’s another service that does most of this now and works called zeronet. I think it was, maybe not now, insecure though. It is sort of like IPFS but runs all connections, if enabled, through Tor to obfuscate where the request are coming form.

    We need something like this very bad because the internet is being censored but they can’t shut it down all together because it would crash the economy. Using something like IPFS run through I2P for connections we could have complete free speech, (there’s some really bad offshoots to this like child pornography, drug dealing, arms trafficking, etc. I don’t think anyone knows how to solve this problem). Those that were popular could have their forums and writings saved on a vast number of people’s drives. Meaning they would be very fast. In some cases much, much faster than the regular internet with one server. No one could block it unless they blocked all encrypted data which would piss business off and crash things so they can’t do it.

    All this is coming but it’s slow. I think this one of those things that kind of meanders along and then one day the whole thing pops up and massively multiplies very fast. Kind of like different social media sites. I think once they get a point and click with maybe a plug-in or two install it will take off if just for the file sharing alone.

  11. Gaikokumaniakku says:

    “All this is coming but it’s slow. I think this one of those things that kind of meanders along and then one day the whole thing pops up and massively multiplies very fast.”

    I have taken a look at I2PSnark. If I ever get it working properly I will have more to say about it. For the moment, it looks like a combination of Torbrowser and I2P to allow highly anonymous BitTorrent use for file sharing.

    I hope that it is easy enough to be user-friendly for the normies, because it could be the breakthrough that the world needs.

    Currently lots of folks use ordinary BitTorrent to grab Game of Thrones from the PirateBay or other sites. Imagine if all those people were using I2PSnark to get those same Game of Thrones episodes, but anonymously.

  12. Sam J. says:

    Gaikokumaniakku:

    I2PSnark

    I use a portable firefox browser to run I2P.

    https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable

    Install. Make sure there is a “FirefoxPortable.ini” file in the same folder “FirefoxPortable.exe” resides(the portable one you installed). Here’s what’s in the “FirefoxPortable.ini” file. You can just make a text file, copy and paste the text below into it then rename as above and it will work.

    [FirefoxPortable]
    FirefoxDirectory=App\firefox
    ProfileDirectory=Data\profile
    SettingsDirectory=Data\settings
    PluginsDirectory=Data\plugins
    FirefoxExecutable=firefox.exe
    AdditionalParameters=
    LocalHomepage=
    WaitForFirefox=false
    DisableSplashScreen=false
    AllowMultipleInstances=true
    DisableIntelligentStart=false
    SkipCompregFix=false
    RunLocally=false
    AlwaysUse32Bit=true

    The line
    AllowMultipleInstances

    is important so you can run a regular browser while at the same time run one just for I2P. You also need the “FirefoxPortable.ini” file so that the portable firefox does’t use you normal browser options. It will use the ones in the local file.

    I open it and set it up to use the “options” in “network” like this page.

    https://geti2p.net/en/about/browser-config

    tools>options>advanced>network>connection>settings>

    Go to this address in I2P opened browser

    http://127.0.0.1:7657/console

    Look at the very top left hand corner and you will see the graphic I2P which is the router console. Click on it you will see various info on the sidebar(Left) and info on the page to the right. One click gives you text and another gives you sites of interest. If you open the torrents link in a new tab,(down low), it will take you to I2PSnark which is a magnet file torrent downloader program that’s built in.

    Here’s the primary torrent trackers in english. Open a new browser tab then input.

    PaTracker 1.7.2 / Postman’s I2P Tracker

    http://tracker2.postman.i2p/

    DifTracker.i2p : Browse Torrents

    http://diftracker.i2p/torrents.php

    To download a magnet file right click on the picture of a magnet in the torrent description and copy the link. Here’s an example of what the magnet file for

    2001 Space Odyssey (1968) 1080p x264 HQ

    looks like

    magnet:?xt=urn:btih:50dbf6ba8b014e843a942c51e5cdff268dd79969&dn=2001+Space+Odyssey+%281968%29+1080p+x264+HQ&tr=http://tracker2.postman.i2p/announce.php

    You can also open the description link in a new tab and it will say,”Magnet Link Copy and paste this link in i2psnark”

    Copy this and go to the bottom of I2PSnark, click on “Add Torrent”, enter and click “Add Torrent” button on the right. It will then add it and when it finds a link it will start downloading. I warn you it is slow but it’s anonymous. I expect if a very, very, large entity with a massive amount of money knew who you were and what you were looking for they could un-anonymize you but it wouldn’t be easy and almost impossible to prove in court.

    My apologies for such length but it’s unfortunately true that setting up some of these things is a real pain in the ass. There’s way more options besides this but this should get someone up and running.

  13. Sam J. says:

    Forgot something. If you want to run a separate portable browser you need to start I2P and go to this address

    http://127.0.0.1:7657/configclients

    Uncheck the

    “Open Router Console in web browser at startup”

    If you don;t do this it will open you’re normal browser and hijack it for I2P. I have this unchecked. I start I2P, wait about 30 seconds for it to start then open the portable browser. I have mt browser set to open on the router condole page.

    http://127.0.0.1:7657/console

    Once again I apologize for taking so much space but it’s ridiculously hard to find out these simple tips and takes forever if you don’t know a few short cuts.

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