miskStudy: Streamers Now Wasting Record Amounts of Time Finding Something to Watch
cocoTrue
Ha! Jokes on them! I’m middleaged, tired and depressed. I just watch the same shows over and over again.
Same! What are your shows? I’m always playing Seinfeld, Office, Arrested Development.
gregorumAgatha Christie’s Poirot is pretty great
Looks good! And it’s for 13 seasons. Thanks!
Mostly car restoration shows.
Since I had my daughter I dont have whole weekends to spend armpits deep in engine bays swearing at spanners.
Makes sense! I need to branch out for sure. I rewatch those shows all the time because I find them familiar and comfortable.
Bojack Horseman is good.
Sure it's not Ibsen but it's a perfectly serviceable depression re watch.
My wife is also like this and I honestly think the algorithm is geared towards this pattern. It constantly offers a ton of stuff you’ve already watched.
“Hey you liked The Stranger, well i have the perfect movie for you, it’s called The Stranger”
My wife always goes back to the same things over and over. Sometimes it’s Band of Brothers, and I’m like “Awesome, but there’s only so many times I can watch Toye and Guarnere get their legs blown off.”
But then she’ll put on New Girl for the 15th time through (I don’t even think I’m exaggerating) and I want to put a gun in my mouth. I want to punch every one of those characters in the face. Except for Winston, he’s cool.
Same. Star trek is always there for me.
orcaTime to put The Office on for the 150th time!
aceshighi started to watch shows that i was too busy to watch when i was younger… ie: i just finished watching the oc, i watched scrubs and degrassi for the first time during covid. i’m thinking of watching skins (uk) now.
WookieRather do that than waste time watching commercials on cable every day
You can do what you want with your free time, of course, but if you’re wasting hours to find good content… life’s too short, man.
some commercials are so good though.
Nobody’s had to watch a commercial since Tivo came out in 1999.
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.
This makes it sound like you float out a wishlist of movies into the sea and it floats back the DVDs you want like some kind of Poseidon’s Netflix.
Ahahah beautiful!!
Poseidon's Netflix will now enter my daily vocabulary for piracy. Thank you.
that’s actually an accurate description of modern media piracy
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.
Don’t really agree. The video rental store forced you to make a decision because you spent time to go there and the social pressure of actually chosing something instead of awkwardly shuffling away huffing something about forgetting to buy milk. For streaming there is no such pressure or urgency. You’d have something to watch every time if the app forced you to make a decision via say a time limit before it refuses to open and/or some rewards for consistently making fast decisions on what to watch.
I do think the descriptions are very poor, but movie box art and synopsis have always been pretty shit, it’s just more shit now.
Regarding your algorithm rant it obviously doesn’t fit you but on the whole it helps guide people towards choices they’d enjoy. People tend to lock up when overwhelmed with choices so they try to narrow it down. You on the other hand would prefer to slowly peruse a giant genre based category, but that isn’t the norm. However I do agree that they should provide the option, because we’re all different and it’s good to cater to all types.
I can appreciate how algorithms might be helpful with seeing what you like and helping you find other stuff similar for you to enjoy. I think the issue comes when you end up getting pigeon holed and only see certain things, despite maybe wanting to see something completely different. I noticed this when I saw what my Dad’s Netflix looks like compared to mine. He had all sorts of movie suggestions I’ve never seen before due to his different watching patterns.
We’re both in agreeance that they could do a better job with movie descriptions though.
I think it depends on how much of the content you have already watched. I’ve personally watched a lot of Netflix in the past year and it keeps suggesting stuff to me that I’ve already watched. And I don’t mean the “watch again” category. Literally every category on the main page contains stuff I’ve already watched recently and rated.
I also rate every title I watch, in hope of feeding the algorithm. It does offer me new releases which fit, but anything older is completely hidden behind recommendations that never really change (no way to hide away content i don’t want to watch).
I get your point about it being good to guide people towards things they might like, but evidently from the article we are commenting on it’s not really helping on the whole.
I’m just saying the study is a bit flawed in that before we zapped channels but it didn’t take that long to go through the list and then you either picked something or didn’t watch. Going through all streaming services and the content they have takes far longer. It’s a bit like saying people spend far more time in their car after moving to the suburbs. Sure they can work remotely or in the suburbs but they can also work in the city, which is far likely than the reverse of city people working in the suburbs. Not a very good analogy, could probably come up with a better one, but I’m simply saying it’s a lot easier to waste time browsing now.
To continue on the zapping comparison the algorithm in that situation would put the channels you normally watch first. It wouldn’t stop you from zapping through all of them but in many cases it would reduce the number of channels you zap through. Same thing here, if you’re looking for something matching your regular pattern the algorithm reduces the time to pick, but if you want something different it doesn’t help and we’re back to a problem of how to make a catalog of 1000 movies “perusable” with a remote.
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 don’t remember it being that way. Granted I was a kid back then, but I loved being at the store and just looking at VHS cases in the horror section. Never really got to choose and I remember being there for an hour or so cause my mom and her friend also couldn’t decide what to get.
Mossy Feathers (She/Her)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.
I honestly thought the headline was about a new twitch stream trend at first. It definitely seems like watching someone pick out movies on Netflix could be a Just Chatting trend.
“Streamer” has been a widely-used entertainment-industry term for streaming companies for years. It’s not a new thing people are making up to be cute.
For how long? First time I heard that term was when Vinesauce started streaming via Livestream around 2010-ish (I didn’t watch them during their Livestream days, wish I had; sounds like they had a neat setup).
Why not just 'viewers'?
It’s not referring to viewers in the title though, it’s talking about the streaming services
Study: Streamers Now Wasting Record Amounts of Time Finding Something to Watch
Content discovery challenges are forcing the average consumer to spend 10.5 minutes finding something to watch each time they access their streaming services according to Nielsen
Combining those, it sounds to me like their usage of “streamers” is referring to the viewers. If they meant the services, it’d read more like “Streamers now wasting record amounts of people’s time”.
Why do they keep giving the word "streamers" new meanings??
A streamer is someone who streams but for some reason they started using it about the streaming services and now it's also the people using streaming services..?
Breaking: Streamers renamed Ribbons, totally unrelated streamers are up in arms
It’s not new, though. For example, here’s a Variety article from 2019 that uses it that way.
Because “streamers” existed before Twitch? 🤷♂️
Yeah for paper ribbons
If you say so…
What’s up, streams. You been streaming today? I stream every day, stream on brother
That’s the usage you’re familiar with. But even if it was widely accepted at some point, the meaning can change over time. That’s normal, that’s what languages do. If you complain about shit like that, you sound like my 80 year old father.
Right, but part of that process is people thinking some of it is stupid and pushing back. Language isn’t immune to the pressures that form it.
Likewise, just because you know how something works doesn’t divorce you from the causal forces that bring it into being. The language changes because we change it. It’s okay to try to do it actively.
I agree, I’ve always known them as subscribers, not streamers
Did you know that the word “Run” has hundreds of definitions? Like, more then 600 depending on who you ask.
wow never thought about that!
Is it in the running for most useful word, or have we just run out of words?
I don’t know, they should run some studies on it.
Let’s discriminate the term further by calling the producer the “stream source” and the consumers the “stream sink”.
We now have “sourcers” and “sinkers”. Thank me later. Or don’t.
bubblefizzpopThis seems purposeful. Keep people looking instead of watching stuff so they have to spend more time on the platform and stay subscribed.
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.
Surprise! It’s always been garbage! The 80s-2000s probably only have a couple dozens shows that were really big standouts. And Reality TV since the 2000s made a lot of content more available, so it drowns out even more quality shows.
I follow only about 5-8 shows a year anyways. Even less for movies now.
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.
Meh, I don’t think cable will make a comeback, either. My roommate is a boomer and she still watches cable TV, and I can’t even stand to be in the room when it’s on.
I’d just watch nothing if streaming platforms were taken away. I’ll never go back to cable format.
I’m not a boomer. I’m only 36 and I have YouTube Tv which is just like cable.
I’ve met other people recently who switched to cable from streaming too. DVD’s are also making a comeback.
Maybe you can’t stand it but some of us love it. Feels like its still 2004 at my house.
You love the constant ad breaks and lack of ability to watch what you want when you want?
I watch what I want when I want. DVR is still a thing lmao
Dvr is also a slave to cable schedule. You have to remember to record things, etc. Streaming is superior in that reguard.
No? I set a show to record and its there forever.