People (including me) complain about monopolies all the time for various reasons. At the same time, I’ve noticed a ton of complaints about the existence of multiple streaming platforms. But isn’t that a good thing at the end of the day? If streaming platforms consolidated into 2-3 companies, there wouldn’t be much stopping them from raising prices even more.
No, they would put on a pirate hat and hit the seven seas again.
I mean, that is basically where we are coming from. And the record companies still remembering this is the reason we still have usable music streaming services. Might change again as time passes though…
Its a fine line. I try to offer a (legal) ad free experience for my son as a matter of principal. But he asked to watch Naruto and it was only available on crunchyroll.
I signed up and the crunchyroll PlayStation app didn’t seem to have a functional search, recently played or favorites list. The best we could so was pick “all titles” and then scroll page by page alphabetically until we get to “N” then we had to remember which episode we were up to and the navigate to that season/episode. Then it would occasionally crash so we would have to repeat the process to resume playback. It probably only took a few minutes by it felt like an eternity of busy work. Needless to say we canceled that shitshow and torrented, if they are a major publisher and they can’t beat the convenience of casual privacy they are in trouble.
Personally its the convenience and UI that does it for me. I’m not using anything fancy but I have a USB HDD plugged into my home router this is accessible as an SFTP and UPnP media server any device on my network. It won’t transcode or anything but for >95% of content it will play fine on any PC/TV/phone/tablet in the house. The biggest issue is tracking viewing progress which can be an hassle is we do it manually instead of having Netflix/amazon/whatever track it for us. If crunchyroll can’t do that much then they don’t offer any advantage over their free alternatives and not worth an $x per month fee.
Your description fits, though.
Back to the old, but still very true quote:
“Piracy is a service problem.”
For keeping track of what episode you’re up to, maybe try plex or something
