But Is It on Netflix? - Streaming Video Service Thread: Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, YouTube TV, AT+T Watch, Philo, Playstation Vue, HBO Max, HBO Now, Facebook Live and many more

I watched Tank Girl on FreeVee a week or so ago, and the interruptions weren't <that> bad. They were logically spaced between sequences (not always the case with the service), and I counted 7 of them, the longest being 1:30 and three or for that were only 15 seconds. The worst part was they bounced me to another film partway through the end credits, so I had to X out and pull TG back up so I could hear "Mockingbird Girl".

FreeVee's got a really nice selection of vintage TV and a pretty broad selection of films that's quite appealing.

"I watched" = "I screened", obvs.

lol

Tubi is just off the hook with nutzo exploitation movies. reform school girls. teenage hitchhikers. street girls. the naked cage. caged fury. doris wishman's hideout in the sun. just endless really. hot summer in barefoot county! some seriously shitty looking movies. but lots to choose from. i started watching The Laughing Woman from 1969 but my stomach isn't as strong for eurosexweirdness as it might have been in my wild youth so i doubt i will watch the whole thing. probably go back to Hell's Kitchen.

I think Tubi and Comet TV got me over caring about commercials for most things + there's little TV now where a 90 second ad break ruins anything. It would probably suck for True Detective but Death and Other Details? Meh, I'm not glued to the screen waiting for the next riveting moment.

If I didn't get Peacock and Hulu for free I just wouldn't watch them, though. Not paying extra for no-commercials but also not paying for anything with commercials.

The thing is too that streaming ad breaks have nothing on regular TV and Cable breaks these days. A normal 1-hour drama or talk show slot now consists of about 40-42 minutes of show (including credits) and the rest is ads.

The ads are only inserted into Amazon programming, though. I have a Max subscription through Prime and there were no commercial breaks in the latest episode of True Detective.

I started watching Fast X on Prime a couple of days ago and now I'm wondering if there will be commercials if I go back to it. I stopped about 45 minutes in. It was SO STUPID.

currently catching up on some latter season Top Model on Amazon Prime - fun glitch - doesn't save your spot when streaming on a computer! also something weird - they only have select seasons. i had to BUY one.

I watched The Raid 2 on Freevee last night, mainly to see if I could stand watching a film with ad breaks -- hell no, it was awful, not doing that again.

Mid-roll ads in movies are not good, I agree… they should just do pre-roll

several of the freeview channels here insist on inserting 5min bits of 'movie news' (typically just celeb gossip) between two halves of a film (in addition to normal ad breaks). this invariably breaks my recordings because the pvr records it as two bits, without padding, and the second part always starts early.

Wow that suxx

These free channels are made for people who are used to watching non-premium cable channels with weirdly placed ads blaring in every few minutes

I would pay a monthly premium for a world where I could completely escape ads, I would let them charge me an extra nickel per gallon of gas to not play the ads while I'm filling the tank.

I figured out which button to press on the pump at Shell stations to silence the audio on those ads!

(xp Yeah, I guess if the service is totally free (and not "cheaper with ads") you take what you get...)

If I can't pay to avoid ads, I'll get the show some other way.

that *The Laughing Woman* movie was insane. i ended up watching the whole thing. it was strangely...chaste? i thought it was gonna be nutso euro boobage horror. and apparently its actually called The Frightened Woman? which makes more sense. it exists in its own universe. anyhoo, its on Tubi! just in case you want to feel like you are on drugs without doing drugs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH79Rg2ZUGo

After Elvis T talked about Gyeongseong Creature I've burned through it pretty quickly and enjoyed it a lot, but fuck me it's too long - especially the first section of 7 which could easily have wrapped up in 3.

It reminds me of a particularly unsatisfactory RPG adventure where the narrative never moves forward and the tricks you would use as a GM to make sure it does are pretty much exactly what the director does - a character literally trips over a nitrogen cylinder because he hasn't put together that he keeps seeing empty and discarded cylinders everywhere and they have a key part to play.

Absolutely understandable. Kinda how I felt about Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters which seemed like four episodes were burned exclusively on close-up shots about family angst.

Laughing Woman has a Stelvio Cipriani score, can't be a total waste

Tested the new Prime setup by screening all three hours of Babylon (broken in two)...there were only 45 seconds of ads at the beginning: a short Amazon one and a regular ad for Airbnb.

I didn’t know about Freevee until now. Freevee is the name of the TVs installed in every apartment by law in the Running Man.

I think one big reason that streaming ads seem so egregious is that even as more and more shows are filmed and budgeted and paced like movies, commercials have just gotten dumber and more obnoxious and more desperate as they claw for whatever eyeballs they can. You not only end up with really powerful shows/episodes/scenes interrupted by the dumbest shit, it's often the same commercials over and over again, since no one is seriously advertising on these platforms. At least back in the days of peak commercial television the shows were made with commercial breaks in mind. But if streaming is going to do this, then yeah, just stick a few unskippable ads at the beginning.

I don't notice the ads have gotten any more obnoxious, but the repetition of the same few ads really grates

I think commercials on TV are funnier than ever! The ones on streaming are shorter, tho (15-30 secs?), which may hurt… plus, yeah, the repetition.

My bugbear is that all ads nowadays seem to be about "hey, check us out!" but forget the "by the way, this is what we do" part

I guess except the TikTok-styled ads filmed on an iPhone with an actor pretending to be a prole using a product

I think where Prime have fucked up is that when Netflix & Disney introduced ads, they did it via a new, lower priced subscription tier.

Amazon sticking them into the existing tier and making subscribers pay extra for ad.free takes some chutzpah. Their email about it had a reek of desperation about it too, bigging up all the other benefits you get which, apart from the free next day delivery, is pretty unappealing.

the only worthwhile ads are Flo's Progressive ads IMO all others are awful

Haven't seen the flo ads in a long time but the rest of what I see really is terrible.

My dad likes any insurance ad - and EVERY insurance ad. They crack him up. It's true that they're often arresting. It's like insurance companies have settled on absurdity as an industry brand. Inexplicable events, talking lizards.

He'll grab me and say "look, look!" He'll watch it again for the 40th time. In stitches.

Ads suck as much as ever, they might not seem as bad because what I think of as “ad humour” is all over every pos coming out of Hollywood for like the last 2 decades

otm

There’s a Spectrum(?) ad running currently, with a family around a dinner table, that’s as funny than any sketch comedy thing I’ve seen in years.

(The “Expired!” fridge lady is also all-time…)

Prime is yuck now. i've been using it for Reacher and i look around and there is nothing else i want to see. like, nothing. i don't care about wheel of time or LotR and all their other shows look stupid. i remember years ago they would always have some recent movies i would want to see or one zeitgeist-y movie straight out of theaters and their old stuff archive was pretty interesting but now Tubi is all i need for that. feel like they stopped paying as much money for stuff. it all looks B-level. and i feel like they want you to pay for recent movies that would have been free before.

The German action movie 60 Minutes (on Netflix) is pretty good. An MMA fighter is trying to make it across Berlin to his daughter's birthday party (and pick up her cake and a kitten on the way) while being chased by gangsters who are pissed he ran out on a rigged fight. There are fights in a training gym, in a nightclub, in some kind of abandoned warehouse/factory, in the street, inside a parked vehicle, and it's all over in a tight 90 minutes. Recommended.

All films should be a tight 90 minutes. Except ones called '60 Minutes'.

Scott otm, I think if prime is betting on their original series bringing people in it's not a very good bet. They just feel very second tier compared to netflix, and their QC is pretty poor. I mean I will definitely watch rings of power to see if they can pull it together, but the fact that they greenlit that particular show as it currently is and gave it such a huge budget says something about the brain trust over there.

I am about halfway through season 1 of the Afterparty (up through Chelsea’s episode) and am enjoying it very much even though it sometimes gives very strong “We have Only Murders In The Building at home” vibes

i couldn't make it through the first episode of that, it just wasn't funny at all.

At least in the UK, Amazon Prime is still pretty good for cult movie obscurities if you do a bit of digging around - quite a lot of giallo, kung fu, poliziotteschi that's obviously been sourced from Arrow or 88 films so the print quality is generally better than on YouTube etc.

Prime has Deadloch, which was one of the best streaming-only shows I've seen.

Huh akm, I’ve found it to be consistently funny and I’ve enjoyed the tonal shifts between each character’s perspective

On the Prime homepage, they've started mixing the FreeVee film titles in alongside the regular Prime stuff instead of clearly separating them into separate listings (FreeVee Comedies/Dramas/Action etc.).

The fact that our shipping account comes with a free TV channel (??) is just an add-on. There are a few shows I watch (The Boys, LotR), but nothing I'd feel gutted about missing if I ever got rid of it entirely. There is no way I'd spend one extra dollar for this service. I already subscribe to too many others (all of which I watch far more).

My dad loves car racing and I have terrible memories of the tv being hijacked by him for hours on weekends to watch nascar/Grand Prix/etc, I find it intolerably boring to watch. But I’m interested in behind-the-scenes of almost anything, so I’ve been watching the NASCAR: Full Speed doc series and it’s pretty interesting.

I looked up earnings out of curiosity, because I think the pit stop stuff is particularly interesting and was shocked to see pit crew workers average $44k per year, while drivers get a base salary of $112k plus $8-47k per race depending on where they finish. The pit crew’s skills are pretty crucial to winning a race, and it’s a dangerous job, but I guess it’s no surprise that teams making in excess of $100m a year have them on the bottom salary rungs.

All films should be a tight 90 minutes. Except ones called '60 Minutes'.

― organ doner (ledge), Thursday, February 1, 2024 10:36 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm a firm believer that 90 mins is the perfect movie length. Anything over 2 hrs gtfo too long.

i like when i'm watching some movie from the 30s and its 70 minutes long. perfect!

Rear Window is 1:52 - there is no reason on Earth for a dumb action or superhero movie to be longer than Rear Window IMO.

i think i wrote that in a metal review once. that slayer's south of heaven was 37 minutes long and unless your album is better than slayer's south of heaven it shouldn't be longer than 37 minutes. but nobody listened to me.