CULTURE

Streaming Services

The good, bad, and the worst

I don’t really watch a ton of TV, but I’ve been spoiled by On Demand and other cable services that omit commercials so you don’t have to interrupt the movie with some irrelevant sales pitch on how you can lose weight or repaint your house.

When streaming became mainstream, we first hooked up with Netflix, then with Amazon Prime. Now you’d think with these kinds of choices, including comedies, drama, and documentaries — I’d be happy as a clam. You’d be wrong. I’ve managed to find several reasons to hate streaming services.

First off, I hate Amazon Prime’s way of categorizing films so that you can easily make the mistake of choosing one that costs you more money to view than you thought before you clicked. You have the option of renting the film or buying it. By the time you get to the screen that tells you this, you’re feeling good that you’ve finally found a film that you haven’t seen and that sounds reasonably interesting. But then you click it and find out that no, you have to spend more money if you want to see it. Well, for us, that’s an instant piss-off!

This annoys me to no end. It’s not enough that I’m paying about $13 a month for many films I’ve either already seen or wouldn’t want to see. No, I ‘m now having to fork over more money if I want to see something outside the normal listings. And, worse yet, you have to jump through more hoops in order to get the movie to play. I think you have to promise your first born and your credit card or something like that. This is automatically a turn off for me. If I have to do more than click one or two times at 9 pm after a hard day cursing the pandemic, I won’t do it. I’m just that stubborn. So at that moment in time. I hate Amazon Prime and vow to quit it. I actually did quit it once because for some godforsaken reason, the company hadn’t activated my account.

Also, there is a problem with language, especially on Netflix. My husband is hearing impaired, and the acoustics in my den are lousy. As a result, we depend to a great deal on the closed caption function. More about that later.

When choosing a film, my husband and I will not watch a foreign-language film that isn’t dubbed in English. So that means I have to opt out of a lot of probably good foreign films due to the lack of dubbing. Even with the captions in English, it’s difficult to read all the dialogue quickly enough that you can enjoy the film.

But, and this is the BIG BUT, you don’t know if this foreign film is dubbed until you actually click on the film and wait (sometimes as long as five or 10 minutes) until the actor actually speaks. Sometimes they’re just running around the screen and there’s a lot of noise but no dialogue. Then and only then can you determine whether you have a dubbed or non-dubbed movie.

But back to captions. Sometimes it’s difficult to turn the captions on for a film. I have no idea why except that streaming services do not put a high priority on the hearing impaired. You can find out a ton of info about the actors if you’re like me and keep hitting the wrong screen in your hurry to turn on captions, but the caption function is not that easy to find. And once you found it, it doesn’t mean that you won’t have to find it again and again because sometimes the function is only good for one film and then reverts back to its non-captioned state.

Other reasons I hate my streaming services but wouldn’t give them up: Did you ever notice that the captions that narrate actions or sounds are weird? Four out of five films begin with “birds chattering” or words to that effect. If you can hear the birds chattering, you have super auditory abilities. Why bother telling me that the birds are chattering if I cannot hear them?

Every so often I have to stop a film to perform an errand — e.g., let the dogs out in the yard or let me or hubby into the bathroom. Once in a while through no fault of my own, the film decides not to resume, but to start at the beginning. Even if I keep trying to restart the film, it refuses to budge. It has decided that I should see the film over and putting it on a fast forward doesn’t always work either because I’m not that technically adept.

What’s even more frustrating is the way both streaming services categorize films. When you start up your app and the streaming begins, you are astounded by the number of titles on the screen. Wow, you say! There must be at least 1,000. Actually each film is listed in at least three or four categories so you don’t really have that much to pick from. They just make you believe you’re in the money!

The last piece of frustration that comprises my streaming puzzler is the inability for me (and my husband) to remember if we’ve seen this film before. Of course we could probably track it some way using the app or at least write down the titles we’ve seen, but we’re too lazy to do that.

In fact it’s become a War of the Worlds just selecting a title we haven’t seen, is fairly new, is dubbed if foreign, and is not animated. It takes us almost a half-hour to do all this and by the time we’re done scanning the possibilities, we’ll settle for just about anything. Naturally I’ve seen halves of many films before I realize that I’ve seen the whole film previously. By then, however, I’m too disgusted and tired, or it’s too late in the evening to switch to another film.

Oh the hassles of streaming. But I wouldn’t go without it!