august > January 22nd, 2019, 11:42 AM
Michael > January 24th, 2019, 12:35 PM
Michael > January 24th, 2019, 02:28 PM
Michael Wrote:... Mastercard just announced they now require merchants to get consumer approval before initiating monthly charges after free trial periods end. So automatically billing just became a little safer and easier to manage for Mastercard consumers. Even your local gym wants you to sign up for monthly charges and may require a full annual subscription as a "buyout" in order to end those monthly charges.
Boomstick > February 2nd, 2019, 01:24 PM
Michael Wrote:Either the price for CBS All Access needs to come down or the value of their content needs to go way up. That's not a dig at Discovery or any other show. Right now I can watch a lot of science fiction shows on Amazon and IMDB Free Dive. While Amazon Prime is not free it does entitle you to some special discounts and possibly some shipping advantages over regular ecommerce. I can even get a few discounts at Whole Foods thanks to my Amazon Prime membership.
But the problem for Amazon and everyone is that consumers just cannot afford to subscribe to all these competing services. And they aren't just competing with each other inside their industries. Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, CBS, and other streaming services have to compete with Microsoft Office, which switched over to an annual subscription model. You can still buy a lifelong license but it's $2-300 last time I checked. I've switched over to the ad-supported WPS Office (which so far has proven to be fully compatible with all my Microsoft Office files). I could upgrade to an annual license for $20 a year but don't yet need to do that. Even so, it's much less expensive than Microsoft Office.
So multiply these competing costs by all the industries vying for consumer conscription money. Those monthly fees are horrendously expensive, especially when banks charge consumers overage and late fees on their credit cards because they couldn't make their monthly payments in time. Mastercard just announced they now require merchants to get consumer approval before initiating monthly charges after free trial periods end. So automatically billing just became a little safer and easier to manage for Mastercard consumers. Even your local gym wants you to sign up for monthly charges and may require a full annual subscription as a "buyout" in order to end those monthly charges.
There is only so much money in the average consumer's monthly budget for online streaming services. They will have to improve the ad-supported model in order to grow their audiences beyond a certain point.
Boomstick > February 12th, 2019, 10:53 AM
august > February 15th, 2019, 05:49 PM
Quote:CBS: All Access isn't just for Star Trek: Discovery. It's provides a large library of CBS owned content, including TV shows and movies. CBS, after all, does not fully participate in Hulu. It also provides live, real time streaming of your local CBS affiliate. As for original content, they continue to introduce new shows, including Christine Baranski's spinoff from The Good Wife....
......
But here's the thing: You won't pay $6 per month for three and a half months of fresh Star Trek (you can quit CBS: All Access and restart it at any time), but you WILL pay $10 or $12 for a two hour movie? Talk to the hand. :jester:
As for Discovery itself, each season is its own story, with certain threads tying one over to the other. Much like Babylon 5. Plot twists to knock you off your couch. Much like the BSG reboot. Cinematic scale special effects -- there is a lot of money in this show.... As for my opinion, due to the technology they use and the wow factor of the sets, this should have been a sequel. But if it had, we'd miss all the wonderful recreation and fleshing out of characters that now have near mythic status.
Anson Mount quietly knocks it out of the park as Pike. The character was clearly the template for Picard, but now we really get to know him. Romijn's No. 1 has made only one appearance so far, but she's apparently a very effective operative. Pike says she has "connections," indicating she's a resourceful officer you wouldn't want to cross. I look forward to what Ethan Peck does as Spock, because at this point in the Season 2 story line, he's emotionally disturbed and fleeing multiple murder
charges in pursuit of an alien entity he's sensed his entire life.
Also, for me personally, the show fulfills part of Roddenberry's IDIC with a fully realized same sex marriage between the ship's chief engineer and one of the ship's doctors. It's tender, sometimes bickering, but utterly believable, perhaps because both actors involved are gay. Last season, the doctor was murdered. But due to the scientific context of last night's episode, he was regenerated.
Anthony Rapp and Wilson Cruz were wonderful in those scenes.
Further fulfilling that philosophy, or perhaps in the most important way, the show's lead is a black woman playing an emotionally complex character who sometimes makes very poor choices and has to pay heavy prices for them. This show has consequences. Also Michelle Yeoh recurs as a shady operative for Section 31, many of the bridge officers are black, some with African origin names and Saru, the first officer, is a new alien, a Kelpian played by Doug Jones. He's every bit as engaging
as Spock was in TNG, although very different. He had a very strong storyline last week. The ship has a of number aliens we haven't seen before, largely due to the show's expansive budget.
As for the Klingons, who cares. I am so over their posturing, which they did a lot in Season 1. In Season 2, they are far less crucial to the story, have grown their hair back as in TNG. But, as for how the Klingons seem to change from movie to series and back again, Enterprise introduced their genetic tinkering history. In Discover, they are still at it and in Season 1 have "re-engineered" one of their own to appear human, with an alternate personality who doesn't know he's genetically Klingon. He's put on the Discovery as a spy waiting for his "kill word." That was a shocker that played out well, as was the backstory for the season 1 captain, Lorca. Fascinating character with hidden motives.......
I like season two much better. If you're an old Trekker like me, the emotional payoff for getting to know Pike, No. 1 and young Spock are huge. Plus, fewer Klingons. Like I said. So over them.
Boomstick > February 15th, 2019, 09:31 PM
Michael > February 16th, 2019, 09:01 PM
Boomstick > February 18th, 2019, 12:30 AM
Michael Wrote:The reason I'll spend $8-10 on a movie is that it's a new experience for me. Streaming services for the most part specialize in older content, and that is the appeal of CBS All Access (along with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, et. al.). Sure, they're investing in new productions but I'm already paying for cable service. While it's expensive compared to any single streaming service, it includes a lot more original programming than all these streaming platforms combined. The early adapters will have to carry them through to the point where I'm ready to cut the cord.
That said, Star Trek: Discovery was nothing like Roddenberry's world to me (and I say that based only on watching a few minutes of the first episode). If you can't sell me on the first few minutes it doesn't matter how much closer you get in later episodes.
Stargate SG-1 was almost nothing like the original "Stargate" movie, but they managed to create something that appealed to me anyway. Having lived through a hand-off of major characters (Kurt Russell to Richard Dean Anderson, James Spader to Michael Shanks), I think I can claim to be open-minded about new generations of actors and writers taking over a franchise (and the time lag between movie and show was only 3 years, so "Stargate" was still fresh in my mind).
They blew the candle out for me and I suppose a few million other fans of Trek with Discovery, and that's probably normal. Honestly, the way the movie franchise was going, I suspect people were just ready to give up on Trek anyway. Every new iteration of the franchise has annoyed some of the fans and brought in new fans. I know some people love Discovery and they'd like to see this phase of the franchise continue but this evolution has been really painful for everyone. Wherever they go next, they're going to have to live without some of the older fans (of more than one generation).