Wow, Paramount Plus sure is a terrible, terrible streaming service

[conuly]

It may actually drive me to buy all my Star Trek shows on DVD, because wow. They even managed to break commercial breaks (like hell am I paying them the extra $5 a month) on shows that were written for commercial breaks. How did they do that? If you pause, fat chance getting the program to start up again where you were, and forget trying to rewind or fast forward. It is not worth the effort.

It is amazingly terrible. I am in awe. No joke, I did not know it was possible to screw this up this badly.

Comments

[ioplokon]

the only way it might not be the worst is because Peacock exists

[conuly]

How is this even possible I do not understand

[ioplokon]

I do think it is probably genuinely difficult and very expensive to make a good video streaming site. But also.. you are Paramount! You can do it!!

[conuly]

Also, it's not like streaming is *new*. There's now a minimum bar I just expect them to pass.

[siliconshaman]

And then they wonder why people pirate stuff.. like the ridiculously high prices of blu-ray discs because of 'extra content' that no-one wants, terrible streaming sites where you don't own what you bought and the regional restrictions that make no sense aren't good enough reasons..

[conuly]

Yeah, well, I'd be happy to pirate to watch on my own, but it's really inconvenient to pirate if I want to watch on the big TV with the family.

[siliconshaman]

There is that... unless your Tv accepts USB sticks.

[malada]

Not all USB ports are the same. Some TV USB ports are for upgrading firmware only - you can't capture content on it.

I'm not sure an HDMI splitter with one port going to an HDMI capture device would work. If it does you can edit out the commercials later but there'd still be annoying branding on the screen.

[conuly]

I actually don't care too much about the commercials, I just really, really, really hate that the commercials start 5 - 15 seconds after they're supposed to. And everything else about this streaming platform.

Wait, almost everything else. When you're searching, the letters are arranged in a sensible grid. I wouldn't think this is something worth mentioning except for quite a while HBO Max had them in a fucking line. Who does that?

[hudebnik]

Do you have a Chromecast or similar wi-fi device plugged into your TV? The laptop thinks it's another screen that you can display on, and the TV thinks it's a video input, so almost anything you can watch on the laptop you can watch on the big TV. Almost anything: not all apps on the laptop support displaying the laptop screen to another screen. But Chrome and Zoom do, so we can watch anything on the Web (including anything on YouTube), and anything on Zoom, on the big screen. (If you speak in a Zoom meeting, the usual self-cancellation on the laptop doesn't work with the slightly greater delay from the TV so you get feedback.)

[conuly]

Mmm... well, all our various streaming services go through the playstation?

[hudebnik]

That might work; your playstation is presumably on your home Wi-Fi network. Open Chrome on your computer (you can do this from a phone too, but I don't remember the UI), press on the vertical-ellipsis in the upper right hand corner, find the "Cast..." submenu, and see whether it recognizes your playstation as a possible output channel. If so, anything you can see in Chrome (or YouTube or other Google apps) can also be sent to the big TV. There's an Apple equivalent capability, but I don't know it off the top of my head.

[profiterole_reads]

Crunchyroll ad breaks used to be terrible as well. Of course, now, a subscription is obligatory. I am not looking forward to when there will be ads despite paying the subscription. I miss torrenting, but I got caught once (there's a whole multi-step process in France), so I have to go legal or direct download (illegal streaming sites have too many viruses).

[frandroid]

Oh wow, I thought France was more lenient because of sites like Daily Motion...

[profiterole_reads]

Well, France is lenient compared to Germany. I know people who got caught there and had to pay fines (a few hundred euros, iirc)!

[frandroid]

Oh wow. In Canada you can't really get in trouble. The copyright holder can send a letter to your ISP that they will transfer to you, telling you that you are a bad person and that you are breaking the law. But the ISP is not allowed to pass back your personal information to the ISP, so... they're SOL. I'm still using a VPN to avoid receiving these nastygrams but it's pretty safe.

[profiterole_reads]

Wow, that's lucky! Tbh, it was hard for me right when I had to make the changes. Nowadays, I watch a number of Asian shows that are available legally and for free on the Internet (because region-blocking is dumb and they definitely don't do it as much as Western countries do).

[aurumcalendula]

tbh I'm not sure if it got worse since I was subscribed, I forgot, or if I had the no commercials tier at the time.

I do like owning physical copies of shows I love, so I tend to watch those once the blu-ray/DVDs are available.

[conuly]

Trust me, if you'd had the commercial supported tier you would've remembered how badly they managed to break it.

[thewayne]

That is nuts, absolutely nuts! Maybe if they merge distribution with Apple TV the commercials will go away. At least I hope that'll be the case as I don't want to directly subscribe with Paramount!

[conuly]

I don't mind the existence of the commercials. I wasn't tricked into paying for the ad-supported tier, I was just cheap. What I object to is the fact that we will hit the obvious commercial break, fade to black, fade back in, run for 5 - 20 seconds, and then start the commercial.

[musyc]

My parents are watching through the Magnum PI reboot and the service breaks for commercial HALF A SECOND before the actual commercial break. So each time it comes back on, there is a BA-DUM stinger and a flash of black screen before the show restarts.

How is it impossible to time that? The breaks are built in!

[conuly]

It's amazingly incompetent.

[silveradept]

This sounds like the perfect example of a place that puts zero effort into providing a good product because they can basically slap anyone else offering their stuff with felony contempt of business model.

[conuly]

Is it possible to put less than zero effort in?

[silveradept]

If it is, I'm pretty sure that Paramount will find a way to show us how it's done.

[chelseagirl]

I showed an episode of Strange New Worlds in class yesterday, to pair with the episode of TOS I began the semester with. Pretty bad.

(The class is called Speculative Technologies, btw.)

[conuly]

Streaming isn't supposed to be a speculative technology anymore! We've had time to get these kinks worked out!