Apple Plans Gaming Subscription Service: Sources

Yeah I don’t have any hard data to back up my anecdotal experience here. I also don’t have any interest in digging around to see what data is available. I imagine it’s a hard problem to find accurate data on this—something like swarm size over time for the N most popular torrents normalized by the size of the largest swarm might be a decent barometer?

Unfortunately there are a lot of problems with e.g. Content Security Policy settings that prevent me from giving you a one-click solution to this problem. That being said, if you know how to open your browser console and run some JavaScript, try running this while you're on the API page:

(function() {
  var regex = /"(\w+\.\w+)"/g;
  var proxies = [];
  var match;
  
  while(match = regex.exec(document.body.innerHTML)) {
    proxies.push(match[1]);
  }
  
  var proxy_html = '<div>' + proxies.map(function(proxy) {
    return '<div><a href="https://' + proxy + '">' + proxy + '</a></div>';
  }).reduce(function(html, row) {
    return html + row;
  }) + '</div>';
  
  document.body.innerHTML = proxy_html;
})()

It's just a stupid, quick script that snags the JSON (actually its HTML representation, but whatever), finds anything that's "sort of URL-like"--literally just any number of word characters followed by a single dot followed by any number of word characters--and replaces the contents of the page with a bunch of clickable links to those URLs.

Note: Not guaranteed to run in all browsers, but appears to work in Firefox and Chrome for me. Your mileage may vary.

How is one expected to use that API?

You check which proxies are available with the API? It’s pretty self explanatory…

Also, most of those are terrible proxies, loaded with malware and redirects, and seem to be older scrapes of the PB site.

When the real thing is totally unreliable, and constantly hopping domains, this is what we’re left with.

The Daring Fireball podcast had a bit about how when Tivo came out the entire premise of putting computers into our TV viewing was to skip ads and control the time-table of when shows air. But then content and IP regs came down and now the computers are used specifically to force ads on us (that are more invasive than ever) and decide what we get to watch and when.

Isn't that how Netflix and HBO streaming services works now or am I missing something? I don't know a lot about how game consoles work.

Yes and no. They're actually kind of polar opposite business models. HBO started as an entertainment company that began evolving into tech. Netflix started as a tech company (well, started as a logistics company that evolved into a tech company) and is trying to evolve into production and entertainment. Netflix's CEO said at some point that his company's fortunes depend on getting good at what HBO does before HBO can get good at what Netflix does.

HBO leans much more heavily on a handful of "prestige" original series and early released of box office films before they hit syndication on other services, like Netflix.

Netflix focuses more on having a large volume of stuff available for you to watch. They're pulling more and more original series in, but they don't put as much money and talent behind them as HBO does.

You can basically think of HBO as sort of "higher end" and Netflix as the volume seller that occasionally has good stuff. The two companies are kind of in a race to figure out what the middle ground is.

Amazon kind of splits the difference with the Prime Video, but they focus a bit more on digital rentals.

I just think you overestimate peoples willingness to pay for a lot of different services with a lack new and original content to gain.

People pay, like, $150-$200 a month for cable and only watch a handful of channels. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the general standard amount of TV viewing is going to converge on around $150-$200 worth of streaming bundle subscriptions.

Don't get me wrong, I think this is bad and wish we could decouple content from platform and delivery mechanism. But I think this is where we're heading.