8 votes

HBO Max to remove thirty-six titles, including twenty originals, from streaming

7 comments

  1. [5]
    Protected
    Link
    Why does no one want Infinity Train? Such a good show. It deserved better.

    Why does no one want Infinity Train? Such a good show. It deserved better.

    7 votes
    1. [3]
      Akir
      Link Parent
      Honestly this happening to Infinity Train is pushing me towards embracing piracy. I love animation and I am just sick and tired of constantly getting the short end of the stick. And for some...

      Honestly this happening to Infinity Train is pushing me towards embracing piracy.

      I love animation and I am just sick and tired of constantly getting the short end of the stick. And for some reason it always happens to involve WB.

      One of the primary reasons why I got HBO Max was because they were going to be the streaming home of Rick and Morty. They advertised it like crazy. And yet to my knowledge they still never published the last season on the service. So I canceled HBO Max and subscribed to Hulu - because for some reason it was there.

      I watched Steven Universe on Netflix, but they also decided to not publish the last season on that platform. IIRC there were no streaming options. The same happened to the movie. So I actually gave up and pirated those ones.

      It just so happens the same story is also true of the second season of Tuca and Bertie. I haven’t pirated that one yet, but I don’t know how much more optimistic waiting I can handle.

      There are two anime properties that I rather desperately want to have in physical form. One of them is produced by Netflix and so it seems there will never be a physical release unless I Import it from Japan, and even then I won’t have access to the official English language versions. So once again, I am left to piracy.

      4 votes
      1. papasquat
        Link Parent
        When streaming services went legit with Netflix, I relinquished my swashbuckling ways and went legit for a while, but after the market matured, it exposed yet another flaw with unfettered free...

        When streaming services went legit with Netflix, I relinquished my swashbuckling ways and went legit for a while, but after the market matured, it exposed yet another flaw with unfettered free markets. Every content creator doesn't like having to share the pie with a tech company to serve their content, so decided to make their own service with their own subscription, and content started disappearing from Netflix. Now there's this weird prisoners dilemma going on, where the industry as a whole could make a ton more money if they just collaborated on a single, good streaming service and put all their content on it for a middle of the road monthly charge (maybe 30 or 40 bucks a month), but instead have decided to balkanize the whole thing and charge more for their content than they'd even get on the legacy model, such that if a person wants to watch all the big content providers shows, they're paying upwards of $150 a month.

        I've been happily pirating all of my content for the past two years ago and feel not even an ounce of guilt for it. If these companies are tired of dealing with lost subscriptions to piracy, they'll need to work together to collaborate on something to keep costs down, or maybe stop sinking literal hundreds of millions of dollars on production costs for single seasons of TV shows. Every mainstream TV drama now has millions of dollars of CGI, set dressing, and massively overpaid actors, and a lot of it still manages to be trash. Something needs to give here or the industry is in for a big reckoning within the next few years.

        8 votes
      2. cfabbro
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        Valve's Gabe Newell nailed it years ago when he said "piracy is not a pricing issue, it's a service issue", and that maxim applies just as much to movies/TV shows as it does videogames. And I...

        Valve's Gabe Newell nailed it years ago when he said "piracy is not a pricing issue, it's a service issue", and that maxim applies just as much to movies/TV shows as it does videogames. And I think it's rather telling that I haven't pirated a game in well over a decade, opting to always buy them now instead, but I still regularly resort to pirating movies/TV shows, despite them usually being far cheaper than games.

        Hopefully one day these dinosaur media companies learn the lesson that videogame publishers have, and make their offerings more easily accessible to everyone... but I'm not holding my breath, and until then, Yarr ☠️

        6 votes
    2. eladnarra
      Link Parent
      Yeah, that was the title that stuck out for me. What a loss, especially since it looks like only the first 2 seasons are available on DVD.

      Yeah, that was the title that stuck out for me. What a loss, especially since it looks like only the first 2 seasons are available on DVD.

      2 votes
  2. kwyjibo
    Link
    It seems like this company is woefully mismanaged. I'm not knowledgeable enough to dig into its financial numbers, maybe they make sense and they have a healthy profit margin, but from the outside...

    It seems like this company is woefully mismanaged. I'm not knowledgeable enough to dig into its financial numbers, maybe they make sense and they have a healthy profit margin, but from the outside looking in as a regular consumer, they seem really indecisive about a few things.

    First there was a lot of confusion over what the service's name was going to be and they decided on a name that make people think HBO Max is HBO when it actually isn't, they remove content left and right, then as if the initial naming decision wasn't confusing enough, they decided to overhaul the service under a new name with a different technical infrastructure!

    I can get my hands on every content I want on the planet. I'm subscribed to almost every streaming service available in my country, and if I can't find what I'm looking for on these platforms, I can just torrent it from one of the private trackers I'm a member of -- even if it's a very obscure title. HBO Max was supposed to become available in my country in October, which I was very happy about, not for myself but for my loved ones because that meant they can finally watch most of the stuff I watch in a language they can understand but they seem to have scrapped their expansion plan until the end of 2024 because of their merger with Discovery+. Maybe I'm bitter about that but I believe HBO's content deserves better, more streamlined access than whatever Max is or trying to be.

    2 votes