but you need to be able to afford to buy that land and develop it while also paying for your current housing.

you still need the spare income to buy new land while continuing to pay mortgage/rent at your current home, and the spare time to do all the actual development

If you’re building a house from scratch on undeveloped land then money is probably less of a concern for you to begin with.

Some things cannot be effectively regulated in this manner. At all.

There is simply no way to stop people from building their own 3D printers. There are too many open source designs, and they can be built with very simple parts that are readily available at the hardware store. Most hobbyist-level 3D printers basically come as a kit that they have to assemble themselves anyways. What happens next? Background checks to buy stepper motors? Background checks to buy a microcontroller?

To me this is like trying to mandate government backdoors in encryption algorithms. There is literally nothing that would stop criminals from just using an open source encryption algorithm that doesn’t have a backdoor, so you end up just making it so all legitimate communications are less secure than they should be.

obnoxious executive pay is its own problem, but even zeroing all that out wouldn’t do much for the financials. if you brought that $50m down to $0 and passed that savings on to consumers, each netflix subscriber would save pennies on their monthly bill

the music streaming platforms basically screw over the artists to make that feasible, with the excuse usually being that artists can make their real money touring and selling merch.

the cost of producing music is also infintesimal compared to that of producing film and television. the whole music industry itself is pretty small in comparison, yet Spotify costs about as much as a streaming TV service.

to scale that model up to film and TV would mean either a much higher base price, or a lot less overall content being made. these are viable paths, but both come with big trade offs.

I have a YouTube Premium family plan. We use it so much that it’s easy for us to justify.

The Steam Link app is exceptional. the Apple TV natively supports Xbox and PlayStation controllers so it all works pretty seamlessly.

this doesn’t really answer my questions, though.

netflix was able to afford that much content back then for two reasons

1. they were flush with capital from investors, spending more money than they were making to promote growth.

2. netflix wasn’t running new content, they were essentially licensing “reruns” of content that already had its primary run elsewhere.

basically, everyone got used to a certain lifestyle being subsidized by cheap capital and investors misplaced belief in perpetual growth. nobody has yet to explain to me how this could have been made sustainable.

the problem i have, that nobody has been able to really explain to me, is how the economics of streaming should be made to work.

content is insanely expensive to make. even with all of Netflix’s recent shitty changes, their operating margin is still only about 13%. that isn’t enough cash left over to fund production of every single show they don’t have. and it’s important that they actually be able to fund production, because unlike 10 years ago, most productions no longer rely on first runs on OTA or cable TV to make their money

so it seems to me there are three paths here:

1. the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically increases the base price (remember cable? my parents paid twice as much for it in 2005 as i spend today on streaming services)

2. the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically scales back production (remember OTA TV?) to fit within the budget afforded by a reasonable subscription price

3. studios branch off into competing streaming services

i’m not trying to start a fight or defend shitty corporate behavior (no one will ever get me to pay for ads), i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out

The Apple TV is quietly the best little streaming box. It is very capable, and according to my PiHole it’s far less chatty than my Roku or Android TV devices.

Also, I love Tailscale. I love how this press release reads like it was written by nerds for nerds rather than by writers for investors.

I won’t defend Plex, but Jellyfin just isn’t quite there as an alternative yet. Their ATV app leaves still leaves a lot to be desired. I’m hoping it gets there sooner than later though so I can finally jump ship. The only other thing I really want is some tool to migrate the “watched” status of all my content to Jellyfin.

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The one thing keeping me off Jellyfin is the fact that Infuse for Apple TV doesn’t have great support for it yet. Infuse is by far the most capable media player on the device, and it has excellent integration with Plex.

There’s your individual experience, but I’m basing my statement on Backblaze’s annual drive failure rate reports.

Isn’t Western Digital one of the more reliable hard drive manufacturers?

What are you transcoding from, and what is your reason for wanting to do this? It might not be worth th effort. Lossy to lossy transcoding is already not ideal, and hardware encorders end up trading either size or quality in exchange for speed. I’ve played with NVENC h.265 a lot and found the end results weren’t really any smaller than what x264 gives me for similar quality, so I just use x265 and deel with the slower encodes.

It may be cheaper to just buy more storage.

I don’t think so, because it has become less common over time for Denuvo to be the cause of bad performance. Doom 2016 is an early good example, likely because Id Software takes optimization very seriously. Stories of games having bad performance due to DRM were a lot more common back then. The worst example I can recall was Rime in 2017, which was borderline unplayable until the developers removed Denuvo in a patch.

There isn’t a lot of evidence to back these claims up. For most users, it’s entirely transparent. You would never know a game shipped with Denuvo unless your first launch is offline and it fails to authenticate.

There have been games that had their performance impacted, but I don’t think it’s the norm. Games like Doom 2016 shipped with it and saw no performance gains when Denuvo was eventually patched out. I think titles like Rime and RE8 are usually the exception, but it’s something I always watch out for in reviews. If a game runs bad, I don’t buy it, regardless of the cause.

Denuvo has proven successful for 2 reasons:

1. It’s actually effective. Games go months or even years without a crack.

2. It’s nowhere near as draconian as what came before (TAGES, StarForce, SecuROM, etc). Most players aren’t even aware of its existence. They just buy these games on Steam and they work, which is why all the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in these threads never accomplishes anything.

Remastered CGI and 16:9 would be nice, but I’ll be plenty happy with the original 4:3 presentation. Assuming this release is cut from the new masters made for streaming (and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t), it will look pretty damn good.

Later DS9 seasons were also shot for 16:9 with a 4:3 safe zone, but I would still be fine with keeping that whole show 4:3 as well.

The expanded frame wouldn’t add a whole lot to the experience, because they still shot to capture everything in the viewable 4:3 area. I doubt much effort was put into actually composing the shots for widescreen beyond making sure crew and equipment were not visible in frame.

The problem CBS has with DS9 is the extensive use of CGI throughout live action scenes (like Odo shapeshifting). It’s a lot easier to get away with just upscaling old CGI when most of the relevant shots are 100% CGI and don’t need to be composited back in to the original photography.

You see that, CBS? Warner figured out how to remaster and release their serialized '90s science fiction drama set aboard a space station on Blu-Ray. Surely doing the same for your serialized '90s science fiction drama set aboard a space station is not too tall of an order.

With the WGA and SAG strikes shutting down all production of new content, there’s never been a better time to put your editors and vfx artists to work remastering an old classic.