Why do they keep giving the word "streamers" new meanings??

A streamer is someone who streams, as in Twitch streamers.
But for some reason they started using it about the streaming services and now it's also the people using streaming services to watch stuff..?

Ha! Jokes on them! I'm middleaged, tired and depressed. I just watch the same shows over and over again.

Please stop calling streaming services, "streamers". That term already refers to people who livestream. It's not cute and it's very confusing and annoying to hear about how the MPAA or SAG-AFTRA rail against "streamers" when the average streamer probably makes below $1k a year (if they're making anything), has no employees, and is likely doing their best to entertain a small group of viewers for 3+ hours, live, and without a script.

Oh wait, you're not talking about that kind of streamer, you're talking about the one that serves other people's videos on demand and makes billions a year, all while paying their employees like shit, pledging the bankrupt unions and driving people to piracy.

As someone who thinks a lot of twitch streamers are funnier and more entertaining that 90% of the trash released today, please don't dirty the term.

This is the same issue i seem to have with Game Pass. All scrolling, no playing.

It begins before you even open the streaming service, since you gotta also decide what the hell service it's on

The quality of shows they are outputting is quite worrying. They think they can get away without writers continuous input and it shows.

Netflix in particular I’ve gone from following many shows to only a few.

I joke that I pay 15 dollars a month to watch thumb nails of movie box art scroll by from right to left. I've thought a lot about this, why was it easier to find a movie to watch when you drove to a video rental store? I think it's because there was a shift in how descriptions of movies were being done from Tape/DVD era to streaming. You'd get a few paragraphs and a few pictures on the back of a DVD or Tape, but on streaming you get one MAY BE two sentences. Plenty of times I passed by a movie on netflix called "The Devil's Rock" the box art look like cinemax T'n'A garbage, and the description made it sound very run of the mill shitty horror relying on tits and shitty monster effects. I ended up watching the movie and I was really impressed on how well it was done and how god damn poor the description was.

I also think the move toward algorithms deciding every single fucking aspect of what we see across all platforms has had a huge part in this trend. When combined with the shitty non-helpful descriptions, the algorithm just randomly picks a fraction of whats available to show you in weird, always different categories. When you'd go to a video store, they had back stock, which was organized by genre. So you could walk in and just be in the mood for a horror movie, or a sci-fi movie and browse based on that interest. It's a lot harder to browse based on genres on most streaming apps, Netflix used to let you look at a full list of genres but most streaming services have moved away from that.

So in summary, shitty descriptions for movies, ever shifting categories where you have little control in what you get presented. This makes the total available list of movies feel amorphous. No way to, or not easy to find genres to help narrow down based on a general mood. It's ironic, we have more access to just about any movie you want, but it's harder to actually settle on anything in particular. Also, the move toward streaming has meant that if a movie isn't carried by any major platforms, it for all intense and purposes, doesn't exist. For many years, it was very difficult to find Dogma any where to stream, as an example.

I could make suggestions on how to fix this, but I don't know, maybe they'd help, maybe they wouldn't. It doesn't matter because all tech companies are in fucking love with their algorithms to steer users.

you know, I've got 2K movies on my jellyfin server, along with about 6K episodes. it takes me FOREVER to find something. Endless entertainment, and i still can't find shit to watch.

Well, yeah, there is just so much junk "originals" on streaming services since the studios think the best way to gain subscribers is quantity over quality.

Back in the day, random bad movies are FUN to watch, but now, they are just bad in a boring way.

I don't think anybody wants to attach their name to a bad show, people usually want to be proud of what they worked on. But of course, if the ones insists on pushing out as much """"content""""" as possible at the cost of people's passion, treating people as disposable metrics to pump up the number of shows on your streaming service, then passionless """"content"""" that nobody wants to watch is what you are going to get.

Support the strike, so that there is a possibility that after all this, people can refind their passion and make good, sincere, and human things again.

I have spent literal hours looking for something to watch.

This is why I like star trek. Finished watching TNG? Better watch DS9 again. Finished watching DS9? Well I haven't seen Voyager in a while. Done with Voyager? Well I haven't seen TNG in a while

No I'm not. I have a list of hundreds of movies to watch and I can almost always find what I want.

Sure, here at sea I don't need to wait some stupid service to decide what I can watch and when. The open sea welcomes me and provides for me.

Well not anymore. I cancelled most of them, and I suspect more people will do the same eventually.

In other news, record amounts of filler & dreck being endlessly firehosed onto streaming services.

Rather do that than waste time watching commercials on cable every day

That's why I don't have any subscriptions running atm. I sub one month and watch the thing I want to. After that I'm tone again.

Just wait and see how streaming services will give special discounts for 24 month subscriptions in the near future. After VPNs and password sharing the monthly subscriptions will be the next thing that falls. Then we'v gone full circe to cable.

Does anyone have a tool they recommend for choosing a movie to watch with friends? We usually spend ~30 minutes trying to find something everyone's interested in watching that none of us have seen before.