Streaming services make it very easy to find films and download them, and they can be very useful with their recommendations too. I eventually learned how to download films to watch from websites online after many years of simply depending on other people to get films from. There are now just a few that I visit, but I almost never visit them anymore unless I need a certain film that's not on the streaming services I now use.
Streaming services make it very easy for me to find films and download them, and they can be very useful with their recommendations too. The only ones I use are Prime Video and Netflix. If I didn't have to pay so much for each one of them, or even at all, I'd probably be on others like HBO and Hulu, although I am not sure how good they are.
Using these streaming services didn't make much sense to me at first. Way back, I thought of it as weird to pay so much for a subscription fee and eventually use my own internet subscription to download or stream it, when I could just get them for free on third-party sites. It was when I explored Netflix with a friend's login details that everything changed for me.
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It was way easier to open Netflix, find film suggestions and recommendations, click Play or Download, and just begin to watch what you wanted rather than go through endless links and go back and forth, evading ads and redirects on third-party sites. The conveniences—that's exactly what I was paying for; technically, what my friend was paying for and I was enjoying.
Eventually, I started to pay for my own subscription, and it wasn't even as costly as I thought. There are different levels of subscription, though, and I stayed with the least for a while to know what I was actually going to get with the Netflix services. And then, at some point, I checked out Prime Video. Apparently, you don't get everything on one streaming service platform; some films are exclusives.
Prime Video, I would say, doesn't appeal to me in many ways, just in the few times or days that I have used it. I never thought much about how a streaming service platform's user interface could impact the viewing experience until I tried Prime Video. It wasn't terrible, but it also wasn't great.
Prime Video felt a tad bit primitive. Perhaps I had become really used to Netflix, but Netflix is inarguably better and more appealing to me regardless. I think that I would have thought the same even if I started with Prime Video.
I didn't realise how small Prime Video's catalogue was when I heard about it from someone else prior to seeing it for myself. I mean, I did see a few films that I knew there, but they weren't many. Thankfully, it was my first time, and Prime Video offered me a three-day trial, and that's what I used to explore it. Afterwards, I just stopped using it and went back to Netflix. If I remember correctly, it costs even more than Netflix.
Other than Netflix's wide catalogue of films, the user experience there is actually swell. Some of the films there even come with spatial audio, and, of course, that works pretty nicely with Dobly Atmost turned on my phone. Their UI is pretty intuitive and user-friendly, too.
I believe all other streaming services should offer this as well, but Netflix has a thing with notifications for upcoming films that it thinks I would like, based on my watch history, as well as the ones I asked to get notified of their release. I find that useful, particularly today, as the new sci-fi film Atlas was finally released. (Hopefully, I'll share my film review on Atlas soon.)
I am pretty content sticking with Netflix for now. It will just be an extra expense to subscribe to other streaming services when I don't use them all so regularly. And with Netflix, I am cool with their services.
By the way, there's a new community I started called Digital Lifestyle. It's a hub for interesting, insightful, and useful things that could potentially improve how you do things in this digital world. Check it out, will you? Read more here.