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Comment by dontbenebby | Hacker News Reader

I'm mostly surprised because for free you can request the same titles (including Blu ray) from the local library. In my county you can search for a title and have it shipped from any library to the one closest to you (and conversely return it at any county library location).

Why pay 10ish a month for something that has the same selection and speed as Netflix?

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There's also Kanopy, which is a free limited-views-per-month streaming service you can sign up for with some library cards. My boring Midwestern city's main library has it—the library network in the outer 'burbs didn't, but most people in the area can get a free card in the main system anyway—so I assume it's pretty widely available. Signing up was kinda clunky but now I can watch 12 things a month on it. Selection skews "art" and documentary but there are quite a few mainstream movies on there. Lots of Criterion Collection, too, if you're into that. No idea if you can inflate your views-per-month by having others in your house sign up for it too, and juggling logins.

Criterion also is launching it's own platform next week. I've been missing having the full collection absolute since filmstruck died because it was too good for this world.

I loved FilmStruck and am glad criterion grabbed it.

They are small, so super responsive. I had gotten halfway through a film and was interrupted, came back the next day and it was off catalog, so I gave some feedback about wishing for more transparency.

They sent out a schedule of movies leaving to all subscribes like the next day.

If you liked filmstruck you might want to take a look at mubi as well. They have 30 movies at a time and ever day one movie gets added and another one leaves. It's very well curated and you get introduced to some real gems that you otherwise might never hear of or end up on your watchlist forever. About half the time I watch a movie there because I'm interested and it's leaving soon. It's a great forcing function. Many of the most memorable movies I've seen the last years were through mubi.

Libraries vary tremendously in their selections of DVDs. Some libraries have pretty good selections (though still not nearly as extensive as Netflix). Other libraries have absolutely awful selections.

Also, from my experience, many library DVDs tend to be scratched up (especially popular DVDs), while Netflix DVDs tend to be better (though some still don't play on my DVD player, for some reason).

In my experience new releases have long waiting lists at libraries. Might be less true now that everyone streams most things, but this is how it was when I was in college.

I used to go to the college library and get videos pretty often. I'd usually rip them to my laptop and return them in the same day, letting me get way more movies than I could watch.

It's still true.

Earlier this week I returned a new release that my wife ordered from the library. She waited several months for it to become available.

Part of the problem is that the library allows online pre-orders, so even when the movie is still in theaters, it has a waiting list several hundred deep. The other problem is that the library system holds back a number of copies for people who walk in, which I totally understand. Doesn't help my wife, though.

>Part of the problem is that the library allows online pre-orders, so even when the movie is still in theaters, it has a waiting list several hundred deep.

Also IIRC there's no limit on DVD preorders. Conversely the Overdrive kindle lending service maxes you out at 20 and usually has reasonable (well, sometimes 3-6 week) wait times.

>In my experience new releases have long waiting lists at libraries.

True, but libraries are more my goto for things that aren't on streaming. For example I wanted to watch "Reanimator" and none of my steaming services had it but the local library had a DVD.

For new stuff I'm willing to pay a dollar or two on Amazon. (Especially since you can earn that easily by picking a slowing shipping speed on nonessential items... so order a dvd the library doesn't have, get a credit for a current release, and rent an old favorite to tide you over.)

It's not perfect, but in my experience you're often paying for convenience, and being willing to be slightly inconvenienced pays dividends.

FYI, Shudder has "Re-animator" for streaming. No, I'd never heard of Shudder either. It's a streaming service specializing in "Horror. Thrillers. Suspense". $3.99/month on an annual subscription, $4.99 month to month.

$5 would be a bit much just to watch one movie, but if you had 3 or 4 horror/thrillers/suspense movies you wanted to watch, subscribing for a month, watching them, and canceling might be reasonable.

I suspect that is where we are headed for now. That's certainly how I plan to deal with Disney's new streaming service. There is no way that I'm going to become a regular subscriber to that, because most of the Disney movies I've watched over the last few years are Marvel stuff, Disney/Pixar animation, and Star Wars. For most of that I'm content to wait until it shows up on FXX/TNT/TBS/Freeform.

If something comes out from Disney that I do not want to wait that long for, I'll subscribe for a month to watch it, and catch up on all the others I've been waiting for at the same time, and then cancel.

I just did that with Netflix for MCU. I want to catch "Avengers: Endgame" in theaters, because I'm pretty sure that it is going to be nearly impossible to avoid major spoilers for the whole thing before it reaches non-premium cable, or even streaming, and so took advantage of a weekend stuck at home due to snow to sign up for the Netflix trial, catch up on Marvel, Disney/Pixar, and a few other things, and then canceled.

I think once you've paid for Netflix, Prime video, and your taxes to a public library and can't get content, creators are running the risk people will get fed up and buy a fast VPN instead.

I wish that were so for all over. My library does indeed offer dvds, but the selection is no where as robust as Netflix.

I can hope that one day libraries will stop siloing themselves from each other and implement an efficient inter-library loan system that sends direct to customer.

It’s like they see themselves as competitors.

Here in San Francisco we have a pretty robust inter-library loan program (Link+) but unfortunately it's limited to books only.

ILL exists, but as far as I can tell, it's limited to books.

I've ordered books from libraries thousands of miles away. It takes a few weeks for the books to arrive, possibly because they go 4th Class mail. But they get there eventually.

This depends on your library system. In parts of New York, ILL will send you DVDs as well.

Some libraries used to do that but media mail replaced the USPS service that they used.

In my area, about 40 regional libraries are linked and will ship most stuff to the library of your choice. They also accept returns anywhere.

It’s fabulous except for new bestsellers.

Assuming you're talking public libraries, it depends on the state. Some states do ILL much better than others, including lending through multistate compacts.

Having both a family member and a couple friends who are/have been librarians, I seriously doubt it is a competitive instinct. I'm sure there are exceptions, but most librarians are genuinely dedicated to information freedom. (They certainly aren't getting MLS degrees for the money...)

I doubt they'll ever mail it direct to your home, though.

It has nothing to do with competition. The biggest barrier is cost. ILL is one of the most expensive services libraries provide.

I loved Netflix DVD, but this is the primary reason I canceled. I wasn't watching them as often, and I told myself that once I exhaust the library's selection of all the movies I want to see, I would resume the Netflix subscription.

Are you in Bergen county, NJ? Because I'll be honest, BCCLS is probably one of the best library consortia in the world - 70+ libraries and massive collections. PALSPlus, the Passaic county system, is comparatively pretty awful - in part because of the priorities of the library boards and directors.

> Why pay 10ish a month for something that has the same selection and speed as Netflix?

Possibly because you don’t trust the government.

What is there to trust the government with? And I'm sure anything they could get from the library they could get from Netflix, if they found it interesting/useful.

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