Did they say ads?

Yep. It was pretty clear streaming services were always going to end up the same way from the start. Even YouTube has, although that was harder to predict when it was mostly 30s cat videos.

I’m already thinking about it. I can’t watch new content outside the service, so if I’m torrenting for long term storage regardless, why am I paying in the first place?

You're describing capitalism. That's literally what happens to everything when capitalism is unchecked.

"Hey, we're getting pretty good at producing food. Let's put corn syrup in everything and make cheap food addictive."

"Hey, we just noticed that frightened people buy more guns. Let's make sure criminals can always buy guns so that we are arming everyone!"

"Land is the one thing they aren't making more of. Let's drive prices up while interest rates are low so that people have to spend all of their income on rent or die in the streets!"

When profits are the only motivation, then products and services will only get so good before the investor class starts looking for ways to take advantage of leverage instead of innovation. Unregulated markets create opportunities for unbalanced relationships between producers and consumers, and it is always built on the lie that you can influence the markets by "voting with your dollars," as though enshittification is what we want, what we deserve.

If pirating it and saving to a thumb drive counts as physical media, then yeah, I guess.

Right, give me Seinfeld shows on random. TNG. Fucking early seasons of Family Guy. Community to an extent. So many sitcoms that you can really watch a random episode and be good to go. Sometimes it's midnight and you're too drunk to go to bed and don't want to think about what you're going to watch.

Yeah one thing streaming has never been able to replicate is a shuffle mode. Pirating, I can just load everything into a VLC playlist and mix it

yeah a ten minute script for your local media playershould be able to manage this.

edit: or 'shuffle' I'm a fucking idiot. I'm literally using that for music right now.

I have playlists set up in Plex that I use like a TV channel. One's all [adult swim] cartoons, another is old sci fi, another is just documentaries. Best part is no commercials.

Live TV is handy for sports, but sort of out of date for the modern habit of binge streaming a series.

I don't really want to watch TV starting from the middle of an episode in the middle of a series. I'd much rather just jump to where I was in my Dropout queue and start watching whatever show is next in the list.

Not being funny, I actually do love linear programming. I miss the days when I'd just turn on the TV and there's be a random episode of the Simpsons or King of the Hill, or something with stupidly many episode like one of the thousand Law & Orders.

Picking something to watch from the beginning is a chore, and now I feel invested if I don't end up being in the mood. Stuff that's just "already playing" is something I dreamed of recreating when I started (not)pirating everything. "It started 5 minute ago but this is a good episode " was how I grew up watching TV (and even movies).

Started a while ago, matey.

A lot of newer shows cannot be watched randomly though because the episodes actually build upon each other.

If you take older shows like TNG or X files: you could easily jump back in after missing half a season. The episodes were written to be mostly self-contained, because missing an episode or two because of life was very very common. Season finales were often a major exception, and were therefore also majority advertised so people knew to plan around them.

If you write a show for streaming, however, there is no concept of "missing an episode". So the writers are freed from that constraint, and subsequently write shows that are only meant to be watched in their entirety, in order.

They usually are though. Most content (excluding their own) is not available in all regions due to licensing issues.

we need to change them, not get rid of them. i think completely getting rid of IP laws would benefit big corpos like Disney. they would do to any small creator what Amazon does to small shops. they already try to do it as much as possible, but they'd be much more free to crush everyone else smaller than them.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

That doesn't sound like too difficult of a feature to add to a media server. Just generate a playlist instead of picking the next thing on demand. Could add constraints like "choose show at random but select next sequential episode of that show from the previous one shown" or "fully random but do not repeat anything for x time/things".

Makes me wish I had that stuff set up to experiment with.

Amazon did. They kept the price the same, added commercials, then offered to remove the commercials for an additional $4/month.