Today several users reported that a handful of significant Cartoon Network shows—including Ben 10, Steven Universe, Regular Show, the 2016 Powerpuff Girls revival, Amazing World of Gumball, We Bare Bears, and Chowder—were suddenly no longer streaming on Max with the turn of the month, with no prior announcement of their impending removal.
Just removing Steven Universe alone seems insane to me. I’m not into it, but it has a massive fan base.
From my understanding, Max has to pay every time the show is viewed. So there’s a calculation they have, how many subscribers will they lose by removing it?
For reference, they removed Westworld.
But… wouldn’t that “take up” the views of other shows?
In other words, the consumer has X amount of time for HBO Max, so they’d either be paying for more views on another show or a potential lost subscriber who can’t find anything to watch, right?
And, with all due respect, there’s no way cartoons are more expensive-per-view than other shows.
Ideally they would subscribe and then watch a different service. Or maybe a different cartoon is cheaper per view. Or maybe it’s a retroactive contract negotiation tactic. Basically negotiate or you won’t get any residuals.
Ideally they would subscribe and then watch a different service.
Thats so cynical and self defeating. “They’ll use our competition and save us money.” But you’re not wrong, they could totally be thinking that rofl.
Or maybe it’s a retroactive contract negotiation tactic. Basically negotiate or you won’t get any residuals.
Very possible. I guess all that is even more behind-the-curtain than cable, as when shows disappear there is no reason given, no “protest” like some channels will do.
I feel like streaming has made all this stuff even more opaque.
Max pays who? Warmer Bros owns both Max and Cartoon Network. Are they legit paying themselves, that’s so stupid it must be true.
you know where shows and movies never get deleted from? my home server 🏴☠️
But your home server’s drive can malfunction and then you’re stuck. Unless you make regular backups I guess.
RAID1 is cheap. It’s not a fool proof solution but has saved my Plex library a couple times over the years.
Hell, raid 5 isn’t that expensive. 4 bay enclosure with some drives and your set.
You can even run most of your services on them if you choose wisely. I run all of my arr apps on my NAS along with the torrent client. I use a little SFF PC as my Plex server for the extra power to transcode.
I do have a backup! I just use 4 HDD in raid 1, two separate data pools. so far works great, I’d love to upgrade them from 8tb to 16th one day but for my needs I’m ok for now
If you aren’t doing more you have a parity drive, not backups, to be clear.
If a drive fails you can resilver and your data is fine.
If someone with write/delete access makes a mistake and deletes everything, or ransomware encrypt all your files, you can’t just “restore from last week’s backup” because you don’t have one.
Just recently I finally convinced my wife to watch Venture Bros. I watched it on Max a couple years ago and enjoyed it, but I hadn’t gotten the chance to watch the movie. So I was hoping we could watch the series together and finish off with the movie.
The movie is on Max, but the show is not anymore. The first 3 seasons are on Netflix. Seasons 4-7… They don’t seem to be available anywhere. Well, I think Adult Swim’s website might have it but their website sucks for binging shows even on a desktop, and either worse or literally not possible to use on other devices. I could “buy” them digitally on Amazon. Instead I just bought the DVD collection and added it to my Jellyfin server.
It used to be that a show had to be really special for me to shell out money and dedicate digital and physical storage space for me to buy a physical copy. But more and more I find myself buying the DVD’s and Blu-Rays even for shows like Venture Bros that I like, but may not love. Streaming just keeps getting worse.
I’m fairly certain that Max despises their fan base.
Max is notoriously capricious. If I remember correctly, they have a terrible reputation with animation on their platform.
In a sense I’m surprised these cartoons remained on there as long as they did.
