> I don't really want consolidation, I want to be able to pay to play each work once or for a certain period of time
I'm confused. As awful as streaming is currently, doesn't it really excel at the one thing you say you want to have, but don't?
Let's take my IMDb watchlist as a relevant examples. I've seen the majority of popular films that I'm interested in, so this is a list of ~500 relatively obscure, but mostly well-reviewed movies.
Of this list:
14 films are free with Amazon Prime. Only 14. That highlights the common refrain about the state of streaming. Because of fragmentation, someone with the money for only one or two services will quickly find themselves with nothing to watch.
317 films are available to rent or buy with Amazon. That's remarkable! Even if you want to stick with a single service or app out of convenience, the majority of the relatively-obscure films on my list are available for online viewing.
The real issue, for me, is the cost of $3-5 for an HD rental of a film. I simply don't have that kind of money. A lot of people don't, and that's one of the reasons subscription services are so popular. On top of that, DRM means that I frequently can't be guaranteed the best quality HD stream on my hardware, it falls back to a ~3000k bitrate 720p stream which is noticeably inferior.
But I'm really not understanding your complaint. Granted, it would be great if we could solve the problem of availability for the last ~40% of media not available to stream or vendor-locked, but in general making rentals available is one of the strong suits of the status quo, IMO.
I'm confused. As awful as streaming is currently, doesn't it really excel at the one thing you say you want to have, but don't?
Let's take my IMDb watchlist as a relevant examples. I've seen the majority of popular films that I'm interested in, so this is a list of ~500 relatively obscure, but mostly well-reviewed movies.
Of this list:
14 films are free with Amazon Prime. Only 14. That highlights the common refrain about the state of streaming. Because of fragmentation, someone with the money for only one or two services will quickly find themselves with nothing to watch.
317 films are available to rent or buy with Amazon. That's remarkable! Even if you want to stick with a single service or app out of convenience, the majority of the relatively-obscure films on my list are available for online viewing.
The real issue, for me, is the cost of $3-5 for an HD rental of a film. I simply don't have that kind of money. A lot of people don't, and that's one of the reasons subscription services are so popular. On top of that, DRM means that I frequently can't be guaranteed the best quality HD stream on my hardware, it falls back to a ~3000k bitrate 720p stream which is noticeably inferior.
But I'm really not understanding your complaint. Granted, it would be great if we could solve the problem of availability for the last ~40% of media not available to stream or vendor-locked, but in general making rentals available is one of the strong suits of the status quo, IMO.