Streaming Services

[knives]

How we forget Microsoft.

[dwk]

Don’t have the app but didn’t know it worked through YouTube, thanks. Google seems to be the king of purposefully annoying design.

It was something YouTube added after Roku pulled the YouTube TV app from their app store.

[hearthesilence]

Very late on this, but until noon EST tomorrow (June 10) you can stream Tay Garnett's 1930 feature-length film Her Man if you have a MoMA membership. The script and acting is pretty broad, but it's still worth seeing for many reasons. It's newly restored by Sony and the Film Foundation from the OCN (which was long thought lost until they found it in 2015 in the Library of Congress), and on a technical level, from the production values to the filmmaking, it's quite accomplished. In fact, it's incredibly impressive when you consider that it's from 1930 - the soundtrack is rich and dense with amazing clarity, nothing about it seems primitive, and the camera is completely unhindered by it, with dolly shots every bit as lengthy and mobile as an F.W. Murnau film. And the picture quality is also amazing - it's stunning how much better this looks than, say, the current HD master for Howard Hawks's Scarface (and one of the key actors in Scarface does appear here).

[knives]

So I got a free few months of Disney+ and am catching up with the films I haven’t seen before. This has lead to the question of has any other studio ever so consistently made terrible movies to such tremendous success. The animated shorts are pretty, but stiff and unengaging. The nature shorts are okay, the animated features are obviously great (rewatching them has been the lone joy), but those live action film are, my goodness, just empty calories without joy or art. A Norman Foster made for television movie so far has been the high point. I mean, why have elderly Fred MacMurray as you’re key star for a children’s studio?

I hope there are more plans to put Fox films on the service because as is the Disney bench is pretty terrible.

[therewillbeblus]

At least once a week I consider ethically compromising my fury at Disney to sign up for this service, solely to watch The Simpsons episodes in HD and the correct AR

[willoneill]

In Canada (and other countries, I gather), there is an add-on to Disney+ called Star, that has a lot of the Touchstone and Fox non-G/PG films, and I've caught up with or rewatched a few over the past months, including the Sean Connery film Medicine Man, which as far as I could find wasn't available on DVD outside of a Pan-and-Scan version.

[Michael Kerpan]

As far as I can tell, Disney + has virtually none of the ancient live-action series (Darby O'Gill -- but that's about it). No Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, alas.

[knives]

Yeah, I was surprised they didn’t have Zorro and Dr. Syn despite them having DVD releases.

[Drucker]

Great op-ed about the streaming wars and antitrust.

[Guido]

Just upgraded to this year's Sony A80J OLED after years of waiting, and I'm curious — are there good online spots to track or get recommendations on streaming 4K films? Is there a spot here on the forum dedicated to something like that? I feel like there are probably some gems on various services that just aren't being floated up to the top of the algo's trash pile.

[domino harvey]

FranceChannel.tv offers a wide variety of recent French TV and movies with English subs via a subscription model - you can already watch the English-language French news channel, France 24, included here via YT for free, though, along with the very helpful French Connections segments, which are great for those learning the language and culture in modern contexts

[Robert Chipeska]

Question about MUBI, please.

I understand paying for a sub directly from their site, but there also appears to be a cheaper version via Amazon Prime. My primary concern, of course: is all the content (film only, don't care about supplements or texts in this case) available on both platforms? Or are there exclusives one way or the other?

[perkypat]

You could do a free trial for a week on Prime to find out. There are often special offers for Mubi too, at least here in the UK. Ive had 2 lots of 3 months for £1 during lockdowns, and got a year for £50 last month.

[JakeStewart]

It has all the films the MUBI app does, and the servers are much better. Browsing is just more of a pain.

[joshua]

It has all the films the MUBI app does, and the servers are much better. Browsing is just more of a pain.

I switched over to the MUBI app during their Kawashima retrospective because the Amazon channel was missing a couple of titles.

[Robert Chipeska]

Thanks fellas

[DarkImbecile]

Netflix brokers a deal with France to provide ~$45 million in annual financing to French film and television productions in exchange for shortening the theatrical-to-streaming window from 36 months to 15 months, which may also be their ticket back into Cannes

[DeprongMori]

Anyone else streaming the new BFI Player Classics yet?

It’s still a bit slim on offerings overall though I’ve made a reasonably substantial initial list of things to catch up on. There’s some oddities in their categorizations (“Hue and Cry” is available but not under “Ealing Comedies”), each category is fairly sparsely populated as of yet, etc. It has the annoying feature of playing a film as soon as you expand the description.

For $5.99/month it’s still a great deal, and I’m sure it will be even better once they fix the interface bugs, and populate out the film offerings a bit. Pretty happy with the first stages.

[unclehulot]

Is anyone else having trouble with the resume function on the Criterion channel? Mine hasn’t been saving any new titles or saving my latest viewing positions on older ones for about three days now. New titles that I start don’t show up in resume at all. Sometimes if I search for that title there is a resume button but it often doesn’t save the latest position but an older one. This is happening on my iPad my Amazon fire TV stick and my Apple TV. I should mention I think it’s also happening on ARROW streaming which seems to use the same platform


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Matt]

Yes, I’ve had the same problem on my Apple TV recently.

[fiendishthingy]

I was having that issue on my computer maybe a week or so ago, but it seems to have resolved itself now.

[fdm]

On Roku what I saw last night was that having just finished a film, it still says resume on it and shows up on the continue watching list in my library. After finishing it a second time (there were still a few minutes left it thinkgs), it's still stuck at resume. Of course most/all of the short trailers I've tried have always ended up that way, but for a long watch this is new...

[unclehulot]

I got an email reply from someone at support today who told me they are aware of the issue and confirmed it is a problem that they’re trying to fix

[fdm]

I went back and looked and it was no longer in my continue watching list, so maybe.

[willoneill]

I had a similar issue awhile back with Disney+, where not only would a movie stay in my continued watching list, but it would also not allow us to restart a movie from the beginning. And when you have a 3 year old who wants to watch Snow White over and over again ... well let's just say there were some tantrums.