God I miss this time period for streaming. When basically all the content you wanted to watch was still on one website, with only one subscription needed. There was no need to pirate anything. It was actually easy to watch stuff to the point where pirating was too much hassle. You could share your Netflix account with your family without any BS restrictions. It was great!
Then, the fire nation attacked, and all the greedy companies decided they could make their own streaming service and turned it back to cable…
I remember that. It also used Microsoft Silverlight to run the player which was weird.
All my homies hated Silverlight
It looks like it says iPad in the upper right. iPad never used Silverlight, it had an iOS app from launch, but you’re right in general. PC browsers used WMV for a brief while at the launch of streaming and then switched to Silverlight.
Before they started streaming everything we were maintaining a queue of DVDs and ripping each one onto a hardrive. Good times
Streaming was very much the term used to describe watch instantly language (like all language in the UI) wasn’t random, it was the result of continual testing and optimization. The entire set of activities was new for a lot of people, and the company tested variants of everything all the time. I can’t remember too much about this specific device/UI combo, but probably watch instantly was chosen because at the time it needed to distinguish “instant watching” from managing your ‘DVD by mail’ queue (which was the only thing you could do on the web before “watch instantly” was a thing. We definitely used streaming to describe the activity though; you’d find it in press, earnings calls, etc… Just not in that particular variant of the UI. (source: worked there at the time).
How is this a shitpost? I don’t think this is the correct community for this.
Inb4 nuh uh!!!
I don’t think my family got into Netflix back then. pretty sure like most families we didn’t hop on the Netflix train until it was more of a streaming giant
I had actually used Netflix to rent physical movies long before they started streaming. Though I ended up using Red Octane (essentially GameFly before GameFly existed) more for games than I ever used Netflix for movies. I even still have the last 5 games I rented from RO because they went bankrupt while I still had them. They’re all Dreamcast games lol
Our internet was shit back then. Or maybe Netflix’s streaming was. I can’t recall, but it was constantly buffering when we tried it out. Originally you had access to both streaming and dvd’s by mail, but at some point they forced you to pick one or the other, and with how much of a mess it was, we easily chose to stick with dvd’s instead. Funny looking back on that now
now that you mention it, our Internet was god awful where we were living in 2013. I remember we had Netflix at that point but it was rough streaming anything
What is the first movie in that list? It looks like Noah Wylie but I can’t make it out.
Nice sleuthing!
