Streaming Services

[ntnon]

One more hilarious twist is that you can choose “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” characters for your avatar, but they have removed the actual series from the platform! You can still see full episodes on the Adult Swim website (for now).

Is that irony, an attempt at giving the audience what (someone thinks) they want, or just wall-to-wall bad decisions..?

[Roscoe]

I was able to log on to MAX painlessly, and was disappointed at the interface. It's all lumped into MOVIES and SERIES and WHAT'S NEW. I much preferred the hubs they used to have, for Looney Tunes and other assorted things so I wouldn't have to scroll and search. Maybe they'll change it later on, but it seems a major step backward. And at least one of the films on the app refused to stream -- all I got was a black screen.

Without easily-visible hubs, it'll be a lot easier for people to miss when they remove Looney Tunes or DC or Harry Potter (etc.) content.. and "easier to miss" = "fewer complaints," a win for Warner/HBO!

The Looney Tunes are arranged into "Series" with a selection of cartoons in each "Series" -- but each cartoon is numbered, and they've left the numbers on the remaining cartoons without renumbering them to remove gaps, so you'll see a series of cartoons numbered 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, etc. It's really shoddy.

[Matt]

One more hilarious twist is that you can choose “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” characters for your avatar, but they have removed the actual series from the platform! You can still see full episodes on the Adult Swim website (for now).

Is that irony, an attempt at giving the audience what (someone thinks) they want, or just wall-to-wall bad decisions..?

I’d say it’s a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. User Interface designers not being told about content decisions—made by other departments—that will affect their work. Probably the same issue with the director credits. Much less likely to be the malicious intent so many want to ascribe than to be poor planning and workplace dysfunction. Hanlon’s Razor, or something like it.

[therewillbeblus]

I haven’t played around with the interface much yet, but Max is already annoying just as far as navigating one’s way to new episodes of shows I’ve been watching. Maybe it just didn’t record what I’d been invested in and it’ll all be fixed next week by priming me with the new ep like it used to, but when I go to shows I’m caught up with it’s asking if I want to start where I left off, except it’s referring to some non-existent log midway through the last season, and when I finish an ep it does that thing where it adds it to the “continue watching” section that you need to go in and manually delete. It’s small stuff, but it’s also something relatively simple that all streaming services have down pat, so clearly someone didn’t figure out the most basic bugs before launch.

[flyonthewall2983]

Oceans Eleven is a stunner in 4K

[Matt]

I’d say it’s a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing…Probably the same issue with the director credits. Much less likely to be the malicious intent so many want to ascribe than to be poor planning and workplace dysfunction.

And that’s the official line now: “Max Credits Snafu Could Take Weeks To Fix; Execs Didn’t Know About New “Creators” Label Until After Launch”

In the rush to transition HBO Max to Max this week, a unit within WBD’s sprawling IT department took the credits matter into their own hands. With the plentitude of dramas, comedies, specials, animation, movies and unscripted material from WB, HBO, Discovery and more in the Max inventory, it was decided to create a reductive catch-all format so everything was in place for launch. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the tech team’s efforts never went up the corporate flagpole, where they might have been corrected. The internal consequence of that was most top level WBD executives didn’t even know about the fumble until the slightly shaky launch of Max was live and the criticisms were pouring in online.

[ntnon]

I discovered today that it's now relatively difficult to find out which shows and films are leaving soon. And the hard-to-navigate lost that eventually turned up does not seem to be as comprehensive as the (presumably identical) list that HBO Max was showing a week earlier... that's unhelpful.

Is there a reason (or plausible rumour) as to why the name was changed yet..?

[Matt]

I may have already said this in this thread, but the name was changed to protect HBO as a prestige brand.

People were confusing what used to be called “HBO Max Originals” (such as the “Sex and the City” sequel, “Station Eleven,” and “Hacks”) as being actual HBO-branded shows. That confusion was getting to be more of a problem as less prestigious or high-profile shows appeared under the “HBO Max Originals” brand (such as “Gossip Girl,” “The Great Pottery Throw Down,” and “Made for Love”). I think the HBO people complained, and there was a brief, half-hearted PR attempt to brand the “Originals” content more clearly as such.

Once Discovery decided to add their TV content to the platform (which HBO rightly did not want to have confused with their own brand of content), Max was born, and HBO was given pride of place with their own tab at the top of the app and all other brands relegated to “brand spotlights” buried deeper within the main menu. And “HBO Max Originals” became, overnight, “Max Originals.”

On the surface, it does seem like a demotion for HBO, but there was no option for HBO to go back to being their own app while charging the same $15 subscription price that they used to and that Max still charges for their main ad-free plan. At the same time, there is a strong desire for all WBD content to appear under one banner to compete with Disney+, Paramount+, and Peacock. So this is the non-ideal compromise.

[hearthesilence]

Missed this announcement from late April, but nearly all of Mark Rappaport’s films are now on Kanopy. Great to hear after everything he went through a decade ago with Ray Carney - never let that guy hold on to anything!

[MichaelB]

That’s the first time I’ve registered this saga in a decade - how did it get resolved?

[hearthesilence]

That’s the first time I’ve registered this saga in a decade - how did it get resolved?

Carney basically came away with his career intact and AFAIK returned nothing to Rappaport. He's still listed on Boston University's website, and it looks like he's still teaching because he even received a student rating earlier this month. He's now 76 so regardless he's well past retirement age.

Rappaport resigned himself to this outcome because the cost of continuing his lawsuit would not have been feasible - it would've been far more costly than re-scanning his films, and it appears that may have been completed for almost all of them.

What Carney had or has were 16mm exhibition prints of eight feature films, 1" tapes of five films, and what was believed to be the only copies of Rappaport's short films including the original HD master of Exterior Night (however this film does appear on Kanopy now - I'm guessing he was able to find copies of lesser quality elsewhere). Carney also had what was believed to be the only existing copies of both produced and un-produced scripts.

Last I heard, Rappaport was beginning the process of creating new 2K digital masters, and despite what happened, the situation could have been much worse: for example, he still had all of his original film negatives where applicable stored elsewhere, including the George Eastman House which I believe had already struck new archival prints as well. Rappaport also had the help of La Cinémathèque française, which already had a great relationship with him - Rappaport mentioned they were willing to digitally transfer all of his film negatives and sound rolls at a discounted rate. It was still going to be an expensive process, and at the time, it sounded like Rappaport's fear was that he wouldn't be able to raise the funds within his lifetime, but it looks like that part worked out all right.

[hearthesilence]

I should have done this first, but I searched "Carney" on Rappaport's Facebook page - in 2016 he shared a meme he had made about Carney and his Facebook friends or followers asked him how this was resolved as well:

"No result. The prick is still teaching at BU and I don't have my prints or video masters."

When asked about secondary sources:

"Long story. Had to take all my negatives out of MoMA (that's a story in itself!!) and now they're resting comfortably at the Cinematheque Francaise. I had THE SCENIC ROUTE, IMPOSTORS and EXTERIOR NIGHT digitized. So, now they're all in HD but not 2K."

(FWIW, the info I posted in the previous post was taken from secondhand reporting at the time rather than any direct quotes attributed to Rappaport.)

[MichaelB]

How unutterably depressing. The fact that the situation could have been considerably worse doesn't make it any better.

[ntnon]

I may have already said this in this thread, but the name was changed to protect HBO as a prestige brand.

People were confusing what used to be called “HBO Max Originals” (such as the “Sex and the City” sequel, “Station Eleven,” and “Hacks”) as being actual HBO-branded shows. That confusion was getting to be more of a problem as less prestigious or high-profile shows appeared under the “HBO Max Originals” brand (such as “Gossip Girl,” “The Great Pottery Throw Down,” and “Made for Love”). I think the HBO people complained, and there was a brief, half-hearted PR attempt to brand the “Originals” content more clearly as such.

That makes some sense, then.

But if one wishes to compete with Paramount+ and Disney+ in Warner's 100th Anniversay year, was there really nobody pushing a better name..?

[Matt]

“Max” at least has some brand recognition, probably preferable to a whole new name. And the logo is actually mildly clever, featuring the dot from the O in the HBO logo now in the A in Max.

(I sound like a real Discovery Warner Bros. shill/flack/apologist in this thread, but I’m just really disinterestedly fascinated by the whole saga of streaming from the early promise of Netflix to whatever it is now—cable TV 2.0 I guess. It was part of my job for several years to track these kinds of services and their almost entirely negative impact on higher ed.)

[ntnon]

...It was part of my job for several years to track these kinds of services and their almost entirely negative impact on higher ed.)

Ooh, yes please - more on that!

Taking time away from homework and reading, or diluting "good" programming with populist trash, something else..?

[Matt]

I was mainly on the side of helping professors access materials they wanted their students to watch. This was easier in the DVD era when we could just buy what we needed whether it was available at the Target down the road or from specialty distributors for indie films and documentaries. Kino Lorber EDU might be the most recognizable name, but many DVDs for educational use are bought through the individual filmmaker’s online shop.

Then Netflix streaming comes along as professors start wanting to assign viewings from their content. The only options are to use class time to show things using the prof’s personal account, or to have outside-of-class screenings using the prof’s login (the prof there as well or having trusted a student with their password).

Another option is each student having their own Netflix account. Great if you can get the school to pay for it but they absolutely won’t pay for it because it would be taxed as a gift to the student. And you would need to devote a staff member just to managing all these accounts.

Some students will already have their own (or family’s) login and can use that, and maybe hold informal screenings with some classmates, but there will undoubtedly students without access who will be “overlooked” in these informal arrangements. And this becomes a rich source of complaints about institutional inequity and systemic racism, classism, and sexism.

As most people here know, streaming services were never great at getting their exclusive content onto physical media, and it has only gotten worse. Netflix, then HBO, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Peacock, Apple TV+, Paramount+, MUBI, Showtime, Crunchyroll, Acorn TV, Shudder, and more. All with exclusive content not available on physical media, not set up for group or site license subscriptions (where all authorized users have equal access), and all have the habit of “disappearing” content without warning, something that’s very difficult to build a course syllabus around.

Act II of this saga introduces Kanopy as the streaming solution with site-wide access, centralized account administration, and, at first, an easy-to-understand pricing and billing system. You only pay for what gets used or what you choose to license up-front. The downside, with the exception of a generous portion of The Criterion Collection, is the content. Lots of low-budget educational documentaries, some indie films from very small distributors, weird stuff from very questionable content providers, public domain films, etc., but no major studio content and nothing from the streamers.

Act III: COVID hits and our campus goes remote over spring break. Everyone on campus has a week or so to figure out how we’re going to move a very traditional small liberal arts college entirely online for the rest of the term and school year (then next school year).

Streaming video becomes our only option for providing video content and I become an overnight expert in licensing films for short term streaming, some from international distributors who are only just now getting ready to send their film to festivals. But that means they have online screeners ready to go! Other distributors have been caught off guard by this sudden change and require a lot of patient coaxing. And I also become an expert in getting raw video files, encoding them for and uploading them to our brand new streaming server, capturing audio for automatic subtitles which them have to be thoroughly proofed.

(The music profs had it much easier and asked all students to sign up for Spotify for the term just as they would assign them a textbook for the course.)

The commercial streamers are still stuck where they were before all this, if not more entrenched into their silos and less likely consider physical media.

EDIT: The impact of entertainment options on students was not my area. I always endeavored to provide them adequate legal options for video entertainment, especially in the years after our only movie theater and only video rental store closed. Several students–before the streaming era–did develop their own file-sharing server full of ripped DVDs and downloaded torrents, but the school cracked down on that pretty quickly.

[ntnon]

... And this becomes a rich source of complaints about institutional inequity and systemic racism, classism, and sexism.

As most people here know, streaming services were never great at getting their exclusive content onto physical media, and it has only gotten worse. Netflix, then HBO, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Peacock, Apple TV+, Paramount+, MUBI, Showtime, Crunchyroll, Acorn TV, Shudder, and more. All with exclusive content not available on physical media, not set up for group or site license subscriptions (where all authorized users have equal access), and all have the habit of “disappearing” content without warning, something that’s very difficult to build a course syllabus around.

Indeed. 'Access' is (or 'can be') ironically less reliable nowadays because of the everything-online models of modernity. I find it harder to perform adequate searches for materials that in years past I could find easily - and that appears to be because the algorithms currently decide for me. Google presumes to know what I want to find, and only shows me that information - it's an echo chamber of information rather than just opinion.

[Aunt Peg]

For Australians only (unless you know to by pass the geo-blocking) Marco Bellocchio's series Esterno Notte (Exterior Night) is playing on SBS on-demand: https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-seri ... rior-night

Word of warning: includes ads that can't be fast-forwarded.

[Adam X]

I miss the days when SBS were advervse to ads.

How’s their service otherwise? Keep meaning to use it but it being free means there’s always something to get to first…

[bdsweeney]

I watched “Get on the Bus” on the SBS app just last night. It’s not a film available much elsewhere in Australia so I took advantage of it while it was there. The streaming quality wasn’t great but good enough for a film that isn’t easy to find. That’s what I find the app/on demand function best for. Odd, out of the blue films turn up now and then which are worth seeking out and not all of them stay too long as available.

[Adam X]

Which kind of sums up the TV station too. Or at least it used to. Thanks for that. I’m not hugely picky about streaming quality as I don’t have much data to spare. No NBN where I’m living.

[Aunt Peg]

I miss the days when SBS were advervse to ads.

How’s their service otherwise? Keep meaning to use it but it being free means there’s always something to get to first…

The streaming quality leaves a lot to be desired. We've always had poor streaming in my area but when we got a new TV earlier this year the quality improved on everything expect SBS on demand.

The ads are tiresome. It is like a trip back in time watching films on commercial TV decades ago.

[Adam X]

Which might be rough. I haven’t watched any TV that wasn’t prerecorded or streamed in over 20yrs and consequently any ads tend to be incredibly grating. It’s like getting used to eating food without added sugar or salt.

[Gregory]

I'm a bit amazed at people's comments about the (HBO) Max doc Bama Rush. Due to time constraints, I rarely pay attention to user-generated reviews anymore (e.g. on Letterboxd, Rotten Tomatoes, and IMDB), but the swath of negative reviews across the board stood out to me. It seems people either inexplicably expected some kind of horrifying details to be revealed about rush events, instead of focusing on the films's real subjects, or they were angry about the director Rachel Fleit being on camera talking about how she related to the subjects due to longstanding shame that society imposes on bald women. So many who saw this were really confused about the connection between the body image and socialization-related parallels between the director's personal history and that of her subjects? There are even directly hair-related examples that come up repeatedly. I can't really argue without evidence that anything is awry with these reviews but I do remember that many negative comments about Payne's Nebraska were written in Nebraska. I wonder how many reviewers saw this with an open mind versus how many have ties to U of Alabama, sorority TikTok, etc. So many viewer pans of this just don't make sense to me.