YouTube vs. Disney/ESPN Pissing Match

[dagdaj]

One can only watch Alice in Wonderland a few times

I pay for Disney when there's good Star Wars. Can't help it. I'm 54. I was and always will be a Star Wars kid.
Mandalorian then cancel.
Didn't bother with The Acolyte and Dr. Who. Binged them when Andor came back.
Watched Andor then cancelled.

Andor, btw, is the best Star Wars TV ever. Not surprising since Rogue One was the best movie.

I did try the National Treasure TV show. 'Cause that movie....even though it's not great. Or even necessarily good. I don't count it in my even my top 200 of all time. And despite the fact I've never sat down to consciously watch it and may never have seen the entire thing from start to finish in one setting...
National Treasure is the one movie I will watch most likely 'til the end if I come across it on regular TV. It's fun. That's it. Nothing else I'll say about it. It's just escapely good fun for me.

 

[Fryowa]

I pay for Disney when there's good Star Wars. Can't help it. I'm 54. I was and always will be a Star Wars kid.
Mandalorian then cancel.
Didn't bother with The Acolyte and Dr. Who. Binged them when Andor came back.
Watched Andor then cancelled.

Andor, btw, is the best Star Wars TV ever. Not surprising since Rogue One was the best movie.

I did try the National Treasure TV show. 'Cause that movie....even though it's not great. Or even necessarily good. I don't count it in my even my top 200 of all time. And despite the fact I've never sat down to consciously watch it and may never have seen the entire thing from start to finish in one setting...
National Treasure is the one movie I will watch most likely 'til the end if I come across it on regular TV. It's fun. That's it. Nothing else I'll say about it. It's just escapely good fun for me.

Now I'm going to contradict myself and mention that anytime I'm scrolling YTTV and see Star Wars on the weekend I watch. Don't know what network it is but about once a month I'll be scrolling and see the first Star Wars on followed by Empire and ROTJ. My gf laughs because she knows I'm in the recliner for about the next 7 hours. I'm 45 and between my dad, my brother, and me we wore out a few VHS copies of all three.

Love SW. Hope this doesn't trigger you but The Phantom Menace is one of the worst things ever put on film.

Conversely, seeing this scene in Rogue One made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Greatest scene in the entire franchise. As a 6 year old I was scared to death of Darth Vader and the nostalgia that this one finally tied into A New Hope made me want to run through a brick wall. Top film villain of all time. Damn, now I want to go watch Rogue One.

Darth Vader's Rage (2016) Final Fight Scene | Star Wars: Rogue One 4K Movie Clip

In a time of conflict, a group of unlikely heroes band together on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the Empire's ultimate weapon of destructio...

www.youtube.com

 

[dagdaj]

Now I'm going to contradict myself and mention that anytime I'm scrolling YTTV and see Star Wars on the weekend I watch. Don't know what network it is but about once a month I'll be scrolling and see the first Star Wars on followed by Empire and ROTJ. My gf laughs because she knows I'm in the recliner for about the next 7 hours. I'm 45 and between my dad, my brother, and me we wore out a few VHS copies of all three.

Love SW. Hope this doesn't trigger you but The Phantom Menace is one of the worst things ever put on film.

Conversely, seeing this scene in Rogue One made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Greatest scene in the entire franchise. As a 6 year old I was scared to death of Darth Vader and the nostalgia that this one finally tied into A New Hope made me want to run through a brick wall. Top film villain of all time. Damn, now I want to go watch Rogue One.

Darth Vader's Rage (2016) Final Fight Scene | Star Wars: Rogue One 4K Movie Clip

In a time of conflict, a group of unlikely heroes band together on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the Empire's ultimate weapon of destructio...

www.youtube.com

I wasn't a fan of the prequels. The sequels were OK, I guess.

I mean, I was 6 when the movie came out. I did not get initial set of Star Wars figures, but was jealous AF of my friend who did. Star Wars was my 'life' for how long. Star Wars bed sheets. Books. Comics. Trading cards. Figures. Vehicles. Various glowing swords. They didn't even have the capacity to make even 'bad' light sabers' in that era. Not as toys. You just got a plastic sword from Venture or KMart that glowed in the dark and that was it.

If you get a freebie of Disney+.....Mandalorian is 'fun', but not required.
Andor, however....
The first season is just a very good TV show, clearly related to Star Wars, but feels like a slow burn in terms of what we know comes after. Not that it isn't exciting and stuff. And it does Star Wars in a much "realer" way. The way they use natural music at times...both eerie and stark.
The second season continues that very slow burn and continues to distract you with this weird "behind-the-scenes" of the outright bureaucracy of what it would have taken to run that 'Empire'. The mundanity of the pettyness that would exist in an organization that big and intrusive. But midway through that second season.....it just starts burning you towards what you know is ultimately going to happen in Rogue One and New Hope....and what follows. The last few episodes gave you that feeling you got when playing hide and seek when you were like 8. A giddy nervous excitement with a little dread. There were times I'm sure my pulse rate went up....and the muscles around my bladder restricted.

 

[Fryowa]

...it just starts burning you towards what you know is ultimately going to happen in Rogue One and New Hope....and what follows...

That's what I felt towards the end of Rogue One. Seeing Vader's shadow standing in that airlock switching his light saber on brought me right back to 6 years old. One of the best movie endings ever. The alarm going off, the rebels trapped in there begging to open the door, force choking the guy and slamming him into the wall, standing at the dock watching the ship get away...chills. It caught me 100% off guard in the theater.

 

[dagdaj]

That's what I felt towards the end of Rogue One. Seeing Vader's shadow standing in that airlock switching his light saber on brought me right back to 6 years old. One of the best movie endings ever. The alarm going off, the rebels trapped in there begging to open the door, force choking the guy and slamming him into the wall, standing at the dock watching the ship get away...chills. It caught me 100% off guard in the theater.

So all through Andor....knowing that feeling is coming. You can literally feel it start. It's the size of a pea. And buy the end, it's a massive knot....ready for Vader to walk in at the end of Rogue One. In a little over two hours, Rogue One basically fleshes out everything that happened that New Hope pumped jamcram into that opening scroll...

During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal
secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the
Death Star, an armored space station with enough
power to destroy an entire planet.

Pursued by the Empire's sinister agents, Princess
Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of
the stolen plans that can save her people and
restore freedom to the galaxy...

Obviously, that's a great story just ripe to be told.

We kinda know how the Emperor did his thing in laying the foundation of the the Empire...."So this is how democracy dies, with thunderous applause."
Andor fleshes out some of the mechanics of how that looks in the practical world in the microcosm of a several different planets. The bureaucracy. The oppression. Pettiness. Jealousies. Pride. Gamesmanship. Currying of favor.

But what Andor really does is lay the groundwork for the actual Rebellion. It's actual mechanics. The hierarchy. It's funding. It's acquisition of people and materials. And how it was not excluded from battling it's own pettiness, egos, and jealousies and differing ideas. It's two seasons of the literal handful of people that made it possible for all the heroes we know to do what they did in the films and culminates in "It's just people" when Lando rallies the galaxy. (Lando, btw, the ultimate hero of Star Wars. He blew up one Death Star AND was the one who rallied the entire galaxy to spearhead the final dagger to the heart of the Emperor and the Empire). There was no Rebellion without the people of Andor. There's no stolen plans. There's no plans. And no-one to steal them. Just the oppression of the galaxy and some smugglers. They carry the story from simply disgruntled people, to a proto-rebellion, to what we know as The Rebellion.

So damn fulfilling. It makes all that is Star Wars and it's central story....BETTER.

 

[HawkeyeDug]

Both of these companies are wrong. They have Billions of dollars and are still trying to squeeze ever little bit out of each other and the poors end up footing the bill. The games are available for free online. I've watched the Peacock games there, I watch NFL games at another every Sunday, and again NBA last night, after I watched the WBB before.

 

[dagdaj]

Both of these companies are wrong. They have Billions of dollars and are still trying to squeeze ever little bit out of each other and the poors end up footing the bill. The games are available for free online. I've watched the Peacock games there, I watch NFL games at another every Sunday, and again NBA last night, after I watched the WBB before.

The biggest problem is Disney is doing to YTTV with ESPN exactly what Paramount could do to Disney (with CBS programming, what's left of MTV, Comedy Central.....and Peacock could do with NBC/Bravo/etc......and HBO with Discovery.

Hulu Live and YTTV are in enough of a battle...if I'm Disney, I'm not trying to kill YTTV or everybody will take all their marbles.

More I think about it....
I'm putting my money on Prime. I think Apple does it too, I think.
Where you can subscribe to just about anything and you can live within the Apple/Prime app ecosystem. Presumably it could be easy to add or cancel. Although, nobody makes cancelling anything easy.
If YTTV were smart, they'd do the same thing. I think their app is superior to the others.

Hulu's app is the absolute worst. It's downright buggy.

Every time my wife complains about how much we spend on "TV"....I remind her that in 1985 the cost of our TV was the equivalent of $1500 or more in today's dollars. And if you amortize that over say 8 years, it's cheaper than buying a 48" UHD "smart" TV today and paying for a streamer or two per month over 8 years. Not to mention, we ended up with basic cable ($81.99 in today's dollars). And we won't even talk about what a VCR cost in 1985. Obviously, that price came down, but then we bought a DVD player. Even if we go with the $1 VHS rental or the $2 new release.....if you rent two new releases and 2 old videos, that's $6....or $16.95/month. That's twice what I pay monthly for HBO.

The reality is, spending $150 or even $200/month on some combo of cable/streaming.....it's still way less than we spent comprehensively during most eras from 1970 onward. Same with music. Towards the end, a CD with ten songs cost $19.99. You can get Spotify and access to almost everything that's ever been recorded for less than one CD a month.

Some friends and I were bitching about the media wars last night. One of them uses Servarr. Basically for the monthly cost of a VPN and a rather small computer (<$200) and a 5 T hard drive.....Servarr will give you an app that looks like any streaming app on your phone, but includes virtually every TV show and movie ever made. Select it, and your mini computer grabs torrents. And off you go, it plays them on your TV (or phone). I'm reluctant to do it, because, you know....it's criminal. It's basically a TV version of Napster. If enough of us did this, though....it would do to the TV/movie industry what Napster did. The 'medium' would be replaced. In this case, instead of a CD or DVD, the medium is streamers/cable/etc. You'd pay a monthly subscription for 'everything'. Course, that changed music quite a bit. Name the last popular or relevant "band" to come along. You'd have to go back to 2012 and 2013 for Mumford and Sons and Imagine Dragons. Nothing but individuals since then.