This guy is missing out on the present waiting for a future where Netflix has all content availaible to stream for 9.99$ a month.
As far as I know, you can stream much more content from say Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Crackle, etc. Just need to be willing to pay. You can also buy plastic discs from a lot of places. And if you don't want to pay, you can torrent the world.
So I don't really understand what's his complaints about? He preferred it when Netflix was a mail rental company? I doubt that's worthy of HN.
Not worthy of HN? How? He wants to watch old movies, now. (Not in the future.) He used to be able to but now he can't. Tech "innovation" took that away from him. That is an opinion worthy of HN.
On another note: personally, many don't want to deal with Netflix+Amazon+Hulu+whoever. This attitude that one should have faith in the streaming market is an affront and slap-in-the-face to collectors, people with shitty internet, critics, teachers, historians, archivists, remixers, and anyone else with an interest in private use or working with the bits.
Sure, additional services can be provisioned to fill in those gaps... but those gaps never existed when data sharing was about files and not streaming services. This business model of the cloud looks more and more like windshield-repairmen walking around parking lots with baseball bats at 3 A.M.
Really old movies are surprisingly hard to find... Outside of Turner Classic Movies (thanks, Comcast, for dumping that from my package and leaving all the other shit), and the Criteria Collection, it can be kind of difficult to find anything that isn't Oscar-winning or older than 30 years. Torrents don't even really help - you might have 4000 seeders for the latest shaky-cam movie theater rip of a super hero movie, but for a somewhat obscure John Ford western from 1947, you might have two, three, maybe.
I wonder how much of that is due to the reign of terror of the hollywood monopolies in their fight against torrenting? Of course the consumers of obscure movies are less common than the latest blockbuster, but they're out there, and there are enough of them. They're turning off seeding and peering once the download's complete so that they won't get caught. Torrenting can help preserve those old/obscure things and make them available even when the owners don't care and think it isn't worthwhile. But because of the fight to protect the new pop things, the old /obscure ones vanish. Meanwhile, the new pop things have so many more people interested, that they are readily available.
As far as I know, you can stream much more content from say Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Crackle, etc. Just need to be willing to pay. You can also buy plastic discs from a lot of places. And if you don't want to pay, you can torrent the world.
So I don't really understand what's his complaints about? He preferred it when Netflix was a mail rental company? I doubt that's worthy of HN.