What TV Shows Are You Watching?

$35/month
6 accounts (three streams siiimultaneously)
ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN (!)

Comcast: What you say!!
GOOG: You have no chance to survive make your time

We’ll see, a lot of live streaming services have reliability problems. If there’s one thing you can say about traditional cable TV is it’s very consistent.

Then it’s probably the cabling, which would possibly give you issues with internet as well. I’m just speculating and don’t know your situation though.

With these OTT scenarios you have to take into account there are fault points with delivery of source to the transmuxers as well as delivery issues to the CDN. On top of that you often need a strong enough internet connection to handle your connection to the CDN, and the player needs the logic to be able to fail over effectively. Some handle this better than others. For instance Roku not too long ago had serious performance issues with live linear streams where they would stop when encountering too many discontinuities in a HLS playlist. We’ve noticed issues with Chromecast and it’s ability to adapt to different scenarios, and even Apple products have some playback issues depending on the quality of the stream and the playlists. There’s a reason if you go look at any of the reviews for Sling, Playstation Vue, whatever DirectTVs service is they have pretty middling reviews from reviewers with powerful internet connections. And even poorer reviews from users because the average consumer doesn’t have that kind of service.

As for ads, it will most assuredly have an ad block, whether they choose to show that ad block or slate over it I don’t know. Often companies will do dynamic ad insertion over ad blocks, but since these are the same feeds that go to traditional cable outlets they don’t mux out the ad blocks.

Five episodes into Riverdale and I’m still enjoying the show as a guilty pleasure. The Twin Peaks/Blue Velvet vibe is even stronger. All the characters are interesting and pretty likeable, with their own sub-plots that don’t get in the way of the overarching murder mystery.

Also, five episodes in, Jugghead still hasn’t expressed any interest in sex, or a romantic relationship of any kind, and is still mostly used as a narrator/Greek Chorus, although that last party may be changing in upcoming episodes a bit as we start to learn more about his background.

uBlock origin works on YouTube, so I am hoping it’ll work on YouTube TV.

I wouldn’t bet on that. uBlock only works on YouTube because the ads on Youtube are served up separately from the content. YouTube TV will likely be a single stream sourced from the actual broadcaster, ads included. Imagine if you were watching me on Twitch and I just started streaming an ad. You can not block that with uBlock.

To block that you would need some machine learning that can identify when an ad starts and ends. Then it could turn the screen black and mute the audio while the ad is happening.

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Yup they’ll most likely mux ads into the stream. But even if they serve up ads dynamically, you will block them and see a slate image for 3 minutes or however long the ad block is.

Well, we got through all ten episodes in just a few days, and had a lot of fun with it. Due to the obstacles on the course, it should probably be called “are you a professional/champion climber who can jump before the end of this conveyor belt? Okay, you win” rather than anything to do with Beastmastering.

I’d like to see a course that was more kind to women and short people though, as so many failed at points that seemed to reward being tall rather than good strength to weight ratios and good technique.

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They have to show you the NBC stream from somewhere. During e.g. Sunday night football, there’s national ads and local ads. Are they going to splice in local ads from your IP’s location directly into the stream? I doubt it. I wonder if they would even show national ads.

Watchespn.com usually doesn’t show any, you just get a title card and elevator music during commercial breaks.

Been watching a little bit of Killjoys, on netflix. I put it on as a “Eh, while I work, whatever” show, but it’s been upgraded to “Free time watching”, because I kept stopping work to turn and look at the show. It’s kind of a good half-way mark between The Expanse and Firefly(With more than a little feeling of being a spiritual successor to the latter, with the whole sci-fi low-life thing going on), with a little cop/bounty hunter/merc drama thrown in. It’s got it’s ups and downs, but on the whole, pretty bloody good.

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This says it all, really.

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Ten episodes into Iron Fist and it’s really bad. By far, the worst of the Marvel Netflix shows. Regardless of whether you think Marvel should have cast an Asian as the lead, the show just isn’t good. The main character is a bumbling man-child who has no idea what he wants or why he’s doing what he’s doing. Too much of the show is taken up with “palace intrigue” in the Rand Corporation, and it’s just boring. I actually love shows that deal with corporate intrigue or go into the nitty-gritty of what a company is like. I actually wish there had been more courtroom scenes in the Daredevil show, but Iron Fist is just boring and doesn’t go anywhere.

All this, the bad plot, the terrible characters, etc could have been forgiven if the action scenes were in any way interesting, but they’re not. Iron Fist, the character, is supposed to be the PREMIERE martial artist in the Marvel Universe. He’s supposed to be the best of the best. Despite everything else about this show, I had high hopes for the action scenes and martial arts choreography, and while they’re not bad, they’re just… boring.

Daredevil’s action scenes had a kind of brutal realism that made them dynamic. Jessica Jones didn’t have that many fight scenes. Luke Cage is super strong and has skin of steel so he didn’t need to rely on finesse and skill. Danny Rand as Iron Fist NEEDS good martial arts choreography and it just doesn’t have it. A couple posts above this one, Kate_Monster reviewed Into the Badlands, a show I’ve also seen, and she’s right, the show is so bad it’s funny. But the one thing that show does well are its fight scenes. They’re amazing and as good as anything you’ll see in a movie like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero, or anything else on the big screen. By contrast, Iron Fist’s action scenes are boring. They’re not beautiful to watch or really showcase the character’s skills. They’re just… pedestrian.

With three episodes to go, I don’t think this show can recover. I don’t even think the actors are necessarily bad. Finn Jones and the other leads do a credible job, but the material they’re working with is just terrible. I honestly don’t know how Marvel could have dropped the ball this badly.

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It normally takes a few months for people to digest a show and do do fan edits. Do you think there is enough good material left for a tighter show if someone were to cut out the boring Rand Corporation bits?

Not really. Outside of the Rand Corporation stuff, there really isn’t that much plot to the show. I don’t want to go into spoiler territory, but some of the fundamental story choices made in Iron Fist make no sense to me. And like I wrote above, at the end of the day, I could probably forgive Iron Fist all of its faults and flaws if it had really kick-ass fight scenes, but it doesn’t. My recommendation is to just search YouTube for the fight scenes in Into the Badlands and watch those instead.

[quote=“jabrams007, post:106, topic:277”]
The main character is a bumbling man-child who has no idea what he wants or why he’s doing what he’s doing
[/quote]You know, I can see them thinking “Hey, he’s basically a ten year old boy who has been living among monks, it makes sense that he’s a man-child in most aspects of his life.” Except they failed to realize how repellent this made the character, especially considering that there was barely any showing the character outside of him being an angsty, angry man-child.

You know what I think would help the show a lot? If they’d held off on filming Defenders and Jessica Jones season 2 until after they’d completed and made their return on Iron Fist. It’s got all the signs of a show made on a very tight budget - which makes sense, with all three high-profile and expensive shows being made at once, along with everything else Netflix is making right now. I think that if they’d have been given a larger budget from the get-go, the show would have been much, much improved.

And yeah, the kung-fu sucked. Some good moments, but it mostly felt like college film students trying to do their take on Wuxia.

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I completely agree. One of the biggest problems I had with the show was trying to reconcile Danny’s character as, as you put it, “an angsty, angry man-child,” with someone capable of becoming the Iron Fist in the first place. Without giving away any spoilers, Danny says again and again throughout the show that he “earned” the title of Iron Fist and it was the hardest thing he’s ever done. I have no idea how he was chosen based on how they portray his personality.

Where is the wisdom, the patience, the insight that should be required to become the Iron Fist? Danny’s character certainly doesn’t show any of those characteristics. He may have been training in Kung-Fu in an other-dimensional monastery for 15 years, but he’s still not 10 or 12 or however old he’s supposed to be. Even training in Kun Lun, I’d still expect him to be mature and somewhat introspective and act like a responsible adult.

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[quote=“jabrams007, post:110, topic:277”]
Where is the wisdom, the patience, the insight that should be required to become the Iron Fist? Danny’s character certainly doesn’t show any of those characteristics. He may have been training in Kung-Fu in an other-dimensional monastery for 15 years, but he’s still not 10 or 12 or however old he’s supposed to be. Even training in Kun Lun, I’d still expect him to be mature and somewhat introspective and act like a responsible adult.
[/quote]True that. I mean, sure, he’s not going to have more than a 10-year-old’s understanding of the western world, but have you ever seen a Buddhist monk that acts like Danny does? Let alone one that’s good enough to be considered one of the best, if not the best of the lot? Most martial arts aim to teach discipline, self-control, calm and presence of mind as central skills, and this dude is meant to be a master of all Kung Fu, what, did he just skip class that day?

I expect him to be a little otherworldly and out of sorts, and have a childish understanding - I don’t expect him to be a raging, idiotic man-child with a lack of impulse control only rivaled by the likes of Wolverine or The Hulk.

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Again, I completely agree. This is a minor spoiler for the show, but he doesn’t even know how to BE the Iron Fist. It’s like he finally won the title and then he skipped out the next day to go on Spring Break in New York City before he even learned what the Iron Fist was capable of.

[quote=“jabrams007, post:112, topic:277”]
It’s like he finally won the title and then he skipped out the next day to go on Spring Break in New York City before he even learned what the Iron Fist was capable of.
[/quote]Sure a hell knows that it’s good for when you lose your keys. I swear, dude punches more doors than people.

This isn’t really a big spoiler, but the show would have made SO much more sense if Danny left Kun Lun BECAUSE he discovered that the Hand had infiltrated the Rand Corporation and was up to all kinds of bad stuff in NYC.

Instead, the creators and writers of the show decided that he basically abandoned Kun Lun, and abdicated his responsibilities as the Iron Fist and defender of the mystical city. It’s not until he gets to NYC that he discovers that the Hand is operating there. And once he does, he doesn’t know what to do. He had no real plan in coming to NYC, he had no goal, he shows up at his dad’s corporation barefoot and looking like a beach bum expecting them to welcome him back with open arms.

If they had simply had Danny leave Kun Lun to root the Hand out of the Rand Corporation, that at least would have given him some kind of goal and purpose.

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