We subscribe to Netflix and Amazon and spend way too much time looking for something to watch that we have not seen multiple times and that is actually worth watching. Most of the movies are years old, and even the few that are descent, we have seen too many times. We have dropped HBO and SHO because what is on one today is on the other tomorrow and has already been on Netflix or Amazon.

I can't tell you how many times we will log onto Youtube or Xfinity and watch an old B&W movie from the 1940's. There are many and believe it or not, there are some we have not seen yet. The ones we have seen and choose to watch again are just classics!

I believe that some of the new and better films we've watched lately are actually foreign films. Some are dubbed into English and some have subtitles, but at least some are worth dealing with. Most of the junk coming out of Hollywood lately is unwatchable - at least to us. It seems they just can't think of new story lines, new concepts and movies that are not almost carbon copies of dozens of other films - basically the same story line.

The last "series" we thought was actually quite good was "The Americans". I believe that was an 8 season series and we did enjoy it - pretty realistic if you ask me! The rest of the series we have tried we either got bored of in 2 or 3 episodes or was just terrible.

Thankfully, we both have hobbies to keep us busy after giving up on TV. We have also just about stopped going to the movie theatre as the films made today (for the most part) are not worth going to. The last in-theatre movie we saw that I thought was descent was "Regan". I don't even remember the titles of most we have seen in the past as they are not worth remembering!

Oh - we do watch some documentaries as well but we have seen most of the ones we am interested in already. Basically.... pretty Slim Picken's these days!

It does seem that when a good one comes along, it’s on a Paid Service that you don’t have.

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NRA LIFE MEMBER

If you like cooking my wife and I watch The Great British Bake Off on Netflix.

Like billion to one lottery, pay tv and tobacco tax is tax on the dumb. Alpha bet media is much the same.

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"Don't Give Up the Ship"

It is all about the fleecing of America!

If you have Peacock, try The Day of the Jackal. The first series just ended.

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Release the Kraken

The Diplomat on netflix was good. (2) seasons so far.

Paramount + Lioness, Tulsa, Landman, Tracker, Fire Watch.
Netflix wife loves all the Christmas shows out
Hulu wife finds junk to watch.
All three less than $30 a month and I can stop them anytime
I don't watch a lot of TV, but when I want to watch it, I want to watch now.
Since the bottom two are mostly the wife's they have commercials making them cheap

The fleecing is easy when the sheep shear themselves.

6 years ago after Dish went up twice in two months I gave up TV and sold my TV. Had Amazon Prime but most of the free movies were junk. When I wanted to watch a movie made in the 1930s they were going to charge me so I dropped Prime. I haven't watched a movie in years and don't miss them at all. Back 50 years ago I loved movies but care less now.

If you like crime drama, check out the Topic channel on Amazon. It's an additional subscription ($5/mo, IIRC), but has a lot of good European series. They are best in the original languages with subtitles, but many are also available dubbed in English.

It is frustrating that so much content (older movies especially) that used to show up on late night cable must be purchased or rented because it's not included in the subscription content.

Harrrrrumph!

I throwed my tv away back in 19 and 71.

You could do that back then

There’s always Chess & Checkers, Monopoly, Crazy Eights, etc.
When I’m bored for something on TV, I go t to TMC. No commercials. Gun smoke is probably on right now on INSP. I can’t sit in front of the TV unless it’s funny, gory, or a combination of the two.

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Waiting For The Sun.

This is Golden Age of TV. If you can’t find anything good to watch, you aren’t even trying.

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Rule of law, not a man.

I have found that the Netflix experience is enhanced when you rate things that you enjoy. You then get offered similar movies and series . . .

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Wisdom comes thru fear . . .

We get Paramount free with our Walmart+ and MAX free with our Cricket cell phone plan. Then I watch some of the free ones but Tubi is the best of that bunch. I have Peacock but it's about to expire. Watch for Black Friday specials, I got Peacock for a year for $10 last Black Friday.

Mostly we watch over-the-air. I've taken to recording old movies off it. Yesterday I watched "Tony Rome" (Frank Sinatra) and have another of his movies waiting... "Lady in Cement". One of the channels (Movies!) always has "Film Noir" selections.

Dark Winds, based on Tony Hillerman's Navajo police novels, and The Lincoln Lawyer, based on Michael Connelly's novels, are two Netflix series that I enjoy. FWIW.

Certainly Band of Brothers and The Pacific if you haven't seen them.

Bumper sticker.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

Don’t you get Gunsmoke where you live?

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James
On the Llano Estacado

I'm a movie junkie. I'd watch a mediocre movie over a real good tv show anytime.

I struggle finding decent movies to watch. Very small % of movies made in the last 10 years are worth watching for free, IMO. Bad acting, bad scripts, bad directing, all that kills modern movies.

I too find some relief with watching older movies. I will try to watch most of the movies a fav actor has done. Paul Newman, for example. I had never seen The Hustler until a couple of years ago. Amazing flick.

I enjoy quirky movies that not many people know or have seen. Some of those are Flim Flam Man, Cotton Comes To Harlem, Gator, Follow That Dream, etc. All are wonderful movies, IMO.

Classic movies also fill some time. Casablanca, African Queen, To Kill A Mockingbird, Lillies Of The Field, In The Heat Of The Night, etc. All those get watched once a year by me. All excellent movies.

There's some good western series being shown on Paramount tv. Obviously, Yellowstone is the big one. 1887, 1923 were both excellent series, IMO.

Tommy Lee Jones has a long, long list of excellent movies that may not be widely known. The Homesman is one of them. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is another.

Finding a good actor & then watching their movies can be good too. Tom Selleck is a good follow with his Jesse Stone movies. The older Clint Eastwood movies are a must-see as well.

But the garbage Hollyweird is grinding out these days clearly shows their execs have NO clue about the ticket buying public, IMO. Disney is losing their shirt AND pants. Many other studios are as well. Then they blame the public and/or insult them, like the recent Disney princess. A pox on all of them, IMO.

My .o2

For good television from the "good old days" Pluto TV is a free streaming service and has many good programs to watch.

Television, both cable and air, has pretty much sucked for the past 15 years or so.

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Live long and prosper

We use Amazon and Paramount Plus. Netflix will never see any of our money.

Quite frankly, TV these days isn’t very good no matter which service you choose.

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Life Is A Gift. Defend it!

I subscribe to TCM on Xfinity. Inexplicably, it's bundled with a sports package, but no matter the cost is still reasonable even if I don't watch sports. TCM is full of excellent movies. Watch them as they're broadcast on the channel or stream what you want to see on-demand. No commercials and lots of old black and white movies. If it's black and white, I'll generally watch it.

I've been tempted to subscribe to Britbox. I enjoy a lot of British programming on PBS. Britbox may be good or too much of a good thing.

We ditched satellite cable and picked up Roku with a subscription for Philo. We looked around and found numerous free streaming services, Documentary Channel, Cinebox. Pluto (free with library card), Youtube and others. We have not looked back. $30 a month is better than $200 a month.

The Homesman?
Now that’s a weird movie!
Big Duval Fan here- So I watched Seven Days in Utopia.
Texas Cowboy Golfing Movie? Say what?
Or A Night in Old Mexico.
Neither one near his best, but good enough for us Hard Core Duval Fans.

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NRA LIFE MEMBER

There are several streaming services that are "free with a library card". I chair the county library board and the cost to each library is $20,000. For libraries in towns of 1500 or less that is way too deep for their budgets.

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Front sight and squeeze

I cannot remember the term for this phenomenon. There is another term, "streamflation" which is obvious, but not the term I am talking about.

You will have noticed that Amazon Prime, which is supposed to have free 2-day shipping, which you are paying for with your subscription, includes shipping options which have extra charges. It appears that with the option you can pay a few bucks to get it even quicker...until you read the fine print to find that there is no promise of that at all.

You will have noticed that streaming services which were sold to you initially as "ad free" now are showing ads. Price increases are designed to push you into bundles which require you to see the ads. This thread is observing that there is nothing to watch. How could there be if every movie studio now has their own platform. Are you going to watch Paramount movies on Netflix? Should we expect NBC programs to be on Hulu or on Peacock?

The young folk are suggesting to each other that they jump from platform to platform from month to month. So, the idea is to subscribe to Max while you are watching "Game of Thrones." Then cancel that and go over to Paramount+ for a while and watch "Yellowstone" and so forth.
Anybody here trying this?
"But people don't remember to cancel!"
(I am not referring to jumping around among the free trials BTW.)
There will be some of that I expect, but not enough to keep the streaming services profitable in the future. The problem I expect would be the same as we have seen with time shares or gym subscriptions, they will not "let" you cancel.

Kind Regards!
BrianD

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696-6906-457-38-3913-CS40-411

Yes - frustrating!


Yes, we are doing this to some degree. We have kept Amazon, because it's part of Prime, and Netflix. We also currently have Hulu. Other services we have signed up for and then cancelled after watching specific series. We did that with the 'Topic' subscription on Amazon I mentioned earlier in the thread, and with Paramount while watching another series.

IMHO, this is the only way to avoid ending up spending just as much on streaming as cable or satellite. Ultimately all of these services are about making money, so they're going to leverage the system to squeeze as much as they can out of the consumer.

ETA: Sometimes buying the series on Amazon is an effective way to avoid ads. One series we were watching became ad infested... we were able to buy several seasons for as low as $5/season. Definitely worth it to avoid the ads. Prices would fluctuate, though. I recommend looking at what you want to buy on the computer, then not buying. In a day or two, the price often goes down...

I have to leave the room when the wife searches the selections--too frustrating. We also upgraded to new tv and it is trying to show us way too much information.

Huge amount of free content, lots of movies, on Vizio. But I think it is available only on Vizio smart TVs. Ditto Samsung. TCM usually has a few worthwhile movies each week. Have not been to an indoor theater movie in at least ten years.

The more shows and sporting events go to streaming, the less we watch.
Our Dish bill is high enough, not getting fleeced by all these BS streaming channels. Sadly decent tv shows disappeared quite a while ago.

I just watched "Five Graves to Cairo" which I haven't seen in 25 years. I'll bet I've seen "Band of Brothers" 15 time's. Prime keeps track of everything you've seen for over a year. You can revue and pick out something you've watched and could probably stand watching again.

I read somewhere that subscriptions to the non-streaming movie services like HBO, Cinemax, etc. have dropped considerably. No surprise there. I think they will go the way of Redbox DVDs. At least locally, Redbox DVD vending machines vanished over a year ago. I wonder what they did with the millions of DVDs they must have had. And all of the thousands of their machines. Maybe they could be converted to gun safes.

On the whole, I like Amazon Prime. Convenient, quick delivery, and I watch some of the programming. Also rent movies for a few bucks. But I was pretty annoyed when they made us pay a few bucks extra a month to avoid advertising.

I occasionally subscribe to channels only to watch specific series, and then cancel.

Also maintain a Netflix subscription but watch it less, I think.

Been watching lots of Anime on Hulu. There's some pretty weird stuff, but it's entertaining. I appreciate the artwork.

I'm currently watching one about a spooky kid that's a ghost hunter. She's got skulls for pupils. Like I said, kinda weird.

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Even older, even crankier....

Landman has gotten better. Spent an episode to develop characters, but that's ok. Dune Prophecy got way better in the second episode. Opened up the characters, and the plots.

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Heavily armed old man.

With Comcast there are a number of streaming apps. I get Freevee, Tubi, Xumo, PlutoTV, even YouTube. There are others, too.

There's so much to watch. I really like the '80s and 90s TV shows that I never paid attention to or got to see. Yeah, there are adverts. but even with the ads, it's still better than the garbage being made, now!

IMO, TCM went down hill after Robert Osborne died. They repeat a lot of movies. I do like the film noir they show on Saturday nights. The one movie that played once on TCM was "Come and See" 1985. That's one of the most horrific war movies I've EVER seen.

Last year, one movie that I saw while surfing during prime time was "Pretty Baby" 1978, uncensored. It was on FLIX, IIRC. I had heard of the movie from a film class I took years ago but I had no idea what it really was. If you know about this movie, you know. If you don't, google it. I don't know how it made it on TV during prime time, especially with all PC censorship and everything else going on!

Yeah, there's a lot to watch.

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Thread Killer.

Tubi TV has a bunch of aviation documentaries.

This one, for instance:

Thud Pilots:

Watch free on Tubi. From deep cuts to hit movies, shows, series, live TV and awarded originals. No subscription. Free forever.

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Thread Killer.

We haven't watched TV in probably 15 years.

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it just needs more voltage

In addition to basic cable we get Netflix, Prime, Apple TV and Hulu. It makes me a bit ill to add up how much we pay for what we can watch on the TV screen. But generally I have found new things to watch that I have enjoyed, often late at night after my wife has gone to bed since she won't watch anything very violent. One of extras that we pay for is on Prime, called Brit Box. The Brits seem to make good police/detective dramas. Hulu, which started out with just having old TV shows, now carries a lot of original material as well as the old stuff (I'm been re-watching the entire "Homeland" series, well worth watching.)

The streaming service that I watch most is Britbox. I'm a bit of an Anglophile.

Of course it helps that my Mom was English, and that I lived five years in England as a child. (One year when my Dad was in Korea, and four years, 18 months at Sculthorpe RAF base in Norfolk and the rest of time in London when he was assigned to USAGUK on Oxford Street.)

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Only a cold warrior

A sleeper show that little know about is "Mr-Inbetween" it is available on Hulu 3 Seasons. Australian series about a Hitman. Can often be very funny, sometimes dar, sometimes racy, but always entertaining.

It's a relatively modern show and free of most "woke" content you will see on a lot of current productions.

Several months ago I dropped "Direct TV" and gave away my three flat screen TVs. I now watch movies on my laptop. I have Netflex, Paremont Plus, Amazon, and Utube. I mostly watch Utube old B&W movies. Up side of being senile is you forget what you have watched the day before so every day the old movies are new.

This show was excellent. I watched a newer show on netflix called Black Dove ... pretty good as well.