TheMaster666
Potential
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2021
- Messages
- 320
There are many, many reasons why streaming services in the past few years seem absolutely terrible compared to what they were a decade ago now (wow 2014 is already a decade ago). Among these are the increasingly diverse number of services you need to subscribe to, as opposed to just one or twol; putting in buttons to skip intros, autoplaying the next episode, minimizing the credits, etc.
But there's one "feature" in particular I'd like to call attention to: the pictures of what should be a movie or tv show's poster, or DVD cover.
I mention this, because I've noticed that recently I land up just looking through the service seeing all the things that are on there and thinking, "Oh that's good" for about 50 different things, and then of course playing none of them.
I think I've figured out the reason why. It's these new thumbnails.
A few years back Netflix started this awful trend, where instead of putting the actual movie poster as the image, they instead put up an auto-generated poster which randomly takes some scene from the movie and just drops the title on top of that. Now it seems the other services are following this folly.
This, from the onset, is insulting to both the viewer and the artist who spent time laboring over the poster. There is an artform to making a great poster itself, and like the cover of a book, it ought to represent the film in some meaningful way. You just can't get that same feeling by shoving a random picture from some random scene in the movie, and passing that off as a poster.
But it's worse than that. Because the algorithm intentionally picks scenes only that have people's faces in them, preferably the ones with big eyes and open mouths if at all possible.
They're actually trying to turn real movies into Youtube clickbait filth.
The irony, of course, is that their logic is that this supposedly increases the number of views (why that should matter on a streaming service without ads is beyond me. But then, I guess now all of them have ads like traditional tv/cable, so can they charge more for "ad-free.").
But it's exactly the fact that every single picture has someone or several people's faces staring right at me, makes me way less likely to click. It feels uncomfortable. TV is supposed to be a window into another family or group of friends' lives. It's a one-way thing. Having all these faces staring back at you makes it feel like a telescreen from 1984, where the TV watches you.
I think on a sub-conscious level I feel more uncomfortable, and want to go somewhere else. It's also a turn-off when every movie poster looks bad and looks the same. Part of what a poster, or a movie's cover art, is supposed to do is stand out and feel unique.
Commercial streaming services are trying too hard to be like somebody else, and have forgotten what made streaming magical in the first place. The fact that you could have this infinite library, and just discover something on your own that you thought sounded interesting, gave it a try, and became a fan. The beauty of it was that it's not network tv. No major corporate entity is trying to force you to watch it with endless ads about it. But now streaming is exactly the same way, if not worse.
For example, the movie Almost Famous is about a young kid getting caught up in the rock journalism business in the 70s, and getting a taste of the glamorous rock star lifestyle. I know this, because I saw the trailer. You know where I didn't get that description from? The description on Prime Video. Instead, it starts by telling me about all the awards the movie won. If I didn't know anything about the movie, would I remotely care what awards it won? That means nothing to me, if the actual meat and potatoes of the plot sounds boring. And awards themselves are mostly meaningless anyway, based upon the whims of the judges, not necessarily quality. I don't want to be told how great and popular something already is. That makes it uncool. That means you've already made up your mind about what it's like, and therefore, I don't need to watch to find out. It feels like a sort of predestination.
Every show or movie I became a huge fan of through streaming is something that may have been big, but in my naivete, I was blissfully ignorant of any such accolades. To me, all I saw is a movie I haven't seen before that sounds really cool and interesting. I watch it, and fall in love it, because it was my thing. I feel like I'm the one that discovered it. Or at the most, I heard some off-hand buzz about it by a few people online, which piqued my interest. It may be an illusion, but feeling like you're finding something cool for the first time, without any marketing campaign trying to persuade you, but just organically falling in love with a show--that is a huge part of the magic that streaming should be. I want that freedom to explore.
By the corporate world trying so hard to push me into liking something, the only thing they're succeeding in is pushing me away.
But there's one "feature" in particular I'd like to call attention to: the pictures of what should be a movie or tv show's poster, or DVD cover.
I mention this, because I've noticed that recently I land up just looking through the service seeing all the things that are on there and thinking, "Oh that's good" for about 50 different things, and then of course playing none of them.
I think I've figured out the reason why. It's these new thumbnails.
A few years back Netflix started this awful trend, where instead of putting the actual movie poster as the image, they instead put up an auto-generated poster which randomly takes some scene from the movie and just drops the title on top of that. Now it seems the other services are following this folly.
This, from the onset, is insulting to both the viewer and the artist who spent time laboring over the poster. There is an artform to making a great poster itself, and like the cover of a book, it ought to represent the film in some meaningful way. You just can't get that same feeling by shoving a random picture from some random scene in the movie, and passing that off as a poster.
But it's worse than that. Because the algorithm intentionally picks scenes only that have people's faces in them, preferably the ones with big eyes and open mouths if at all possible.
They're actually trying to turn real movies into Youtube clickbait filth.
The irony, of course, is that their logic is that this supposedly increases the number of views (why that should matter on a streaming service without ads is beyond me. But then, I guess now all of them have ads like traditional tv/cable, so can they charge more for "ad-free.").
But it's exactly the fact that every single picture has someone or several people's faces staring right at me, makes me way less likely to click. It feels uncomfortable. TV is supposed to be a window into another family or group of friends' lives. It's a one-way thing. Having all these faces staring back at you makes it feel like a telescreen from 1984, where the TV watches you.
I think on a sub-conscious level I feel more uncomfortable, and want to go somewhere else. It's also a turn-off when every movie poster looks bad and looks the same. Part of what a poster, or a movie's cover art, is supposed to do is stand out and feel unique.
Commercial streaming services are trying too hard to be like somebody else, and have forgotten what made streaming magical in the first place. The fact that you could have this infinite library, and just discover something on your own that you thought sounded interesting, gave it a try, and became a fan. The beauty of it was that it's not network tv. No major corporate entity is trying to force you to watch it with endless ads about it. But now streaming is exactly the same way, if not worse.
For example, the movie Almost Famous is about a young kid getting caught up in the rock journalism business in the 70s, and getting a taste of the glamorous rock star lifestyle. I know this, because I saw the trailer. You know where I didn't get that description from? The description on Prime Video. Instead, it starts by telling me about all the awards the movie won. If I didn't know anything about the movie, would I remotely care what awards it won? That means nothing to me, if the actual meat and potatoes of the plot sounds boring. And awards themselves are mostly meaningless anyway, based upon the whims of the judges, not necessarily quality. I don't want to be told how great and popular something already is. That makes it uncool. That means you've already made up your mind about what it's like, and therefore, I don't need to watch to find out. It feels like a sort of predestination.
Every show or movie I became a huge fan of through streaming is something that may have been big, but in my naivete, I was blissfully ignorant of any such accolades. To me, all I saw is a movie I haven't seen before that sounds really cool and interesting. I watch it, and fall in love it, because it was my thing. I feel like I'm the one that discovered it. Or at the most, I heard some off-hand buzz about it by a few people online, which piqued my interest. It may be an illusion, but feeling like you're finding something cool for the first time, without any marketing campaign trying to persuade you, but just organically falling in love with a show--that is a huge part of the magic that streaming should be. I want that freedom to explore.
By the corporate world trying so hard to push me into liking something, the only thing they're succeeding in is pushing me away.
