Money. If it’s available to watch somewhere, the people involved have to get paid. Even if it’s only percents of a penny, it adds up and the owners don’t want to pay it.

A few reasons:

Anytime a show is played the streamer has to pay royalties. So for a show like Willow, which isn’t getting a second season and was a flop, it literally costs Disney+ to keep it online because someone may watch it but it’s not pulling in new subscribers

Does anybody here actually know why shows are removed from a streaming service? I don’t, and I wonder if anybody has ever gotten the “real story” on why we just can’t have everything on streaming forever?

We were told digital media and the ability to store everything all the time cheaply in a little bit of space was…

A lot of the shows that HBO max removed such as Westworld or The Nevers ended up on the Roku channel, a free ad supported channel. I definitely wouldn’t be surprised for some, if not most, of the removed content to appear on similar channels in the near future.

It genuinely feels like if it doesn’t make economic sense to keep less popular stuff on a “one price for all you can consume” streaming services, then it should at least make sense to stash them on one of the many “it’s free, but you have to watch ads” services like FreeVee, Tubi, PlutoTV, etc.

Isn’t it ironic that pirates may be our only hope?

At least with torrents there’s a stopgap.

I genuinely thought we were past this. At least with torrents there’s a stopgap. Something like Willow probably isn’t going to disappear for a while. But in 50 years it’ll be like recovering lost Doctor Who episodes on dusty VHS at an estate sale. Someone will find a hard drive with all of Infinity Train on it and the…

I would say that was harsh, but it was a really weird thing for him to say, so I got to agree.

So you never watch old movies? You never go back to see any classic films or TV shows? MASH? Taxi? The Mary Tyler Moore Show? Fuck it, Lost? The Office? Friends?

Streaming is effectively recreating the world that existed before home video, where you’d come across some show or movie on TV and never be able to see it again. We’re going backwards. 

Always fucking weird when a video game that hasn’t come out yet has fans, and they get defensive.

Prepare for what, crying victim because a few gaming news outlets might say critical things about MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR BRAND that a bunch of gamers take personally for some stupid reason? I will never understand these people.

I do love folks finding ways to be preemptively outraged and/or offended.

I mean… it looks like a PS3 game. 

Look, Gollum had it rough, they’re just capturing the experience, k?

I mean, we even got a video apology from Nintendo when they had to restart development on Metroid Prime 4. Some studios still respect their customers.

Ahem

“Up, up and away!”