(OT) Streaming video services

[Joe Bernstein]

So as a few of you may know, I keep a book log that also deals with
stories watched or listened to or both, and have recently been watching
a bunch of Korean TV dramas, and have still more recently posted an
incomplete list of streaming video sites relevant to those shows.

Most of the sites I pay attention to are focused on K-dramas, but I'm
also looking at Hulu and YouTube, and planning at some point to see
what I can do with Netflix. I am, however, becoming aware that
streaming video service has turned into more or less a requirement for
all companies striving to own the human race, so that, for example,
Amazon has one, and if I understand correctly possibly also Microsoft
and Apple and Yahoo and Facebook and ..., and for all I know also
Gazprom.

I don't know of a reasonable list of such services that would enable me
to pick those most relevant to K-drama, and anyway, everything I'm
writing is at least notionally meant for this group. I know people
here watch stuff on Netflix and Hulu, but don't know if anyone here
uses any of the others.

So do you?

Thanks

Joe Bernstein

--
Joe Bernstein, tax preparer and writer <j...@sfbooks.com>

[Drakhoran]

On Sat, 5 Jul 2014 12:50:45 -0700 (PDT), Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

>
>I don't know of a reasonable list of such services that would enable me
>to pick those most relevant to K-drama, and anyway, everything I'm
>writing is at least notionally meant for this group. I know people
>here watch stuff on Netflix and Hulu, but don't know if anyone here
>uses any of the others.
>
>So do you?
>

This is probably not what you're looking for but apparently Crunchyroll.com is
the place to go for anime. They may or may not also have Korean stuff, I
wouldn't really know. Much of the streaming video I watch is on Twitch.tv but
that's an entirely different kind of drama than you seem to be looking for.

[Joe Bernstein]

On Saturday, July 5, 2014 3:48:17 PM UTC-7, Drakhoran wrote, quoting me:

> >I don't know of a reasonable list of such services that would enable me
> >to pick those most relevant to K-drama, and anyway, everything I'm
> >writing is at least notionally meant for this group. I know people
> >here watch stuff on Netflix and Hulu, but don't know if anyone here
> >uses any of the others.

> This is probably not what you're looking for but apparently Crunchyroll.com is
> the place to go for anime. They may or may not also have Korean stuff, I
> wouldn't really know. Much of the streaming video I watch is on Twitch.tv but
> that's an entirely different kind of drama than you seem to be looking for.

Crunchyroll used to be on my list until they produced a different URL
for K-dramas, that had more of them, and that I'm pretty sure I listed
in the post I mentioned. (<http://www.kdrama.com/>, anyway.)

I'll see about twitch.tv.

Thanks

-- JLB

[Greg Goss]

Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:

>I know people
>here watch stuff on Netflix and Hulu, but don't know if anyone here
>uses any of the others.

My wife subscribes to Netflix Canada, and I've been really
disappointed with the selection available. We still "rent" movies
fairly often from our "cable" telco.

Apparently Netflix US has much better success getting the rights to
stream stuff than Netflix Canada.

So when you get reviews of the various services, it's probably
important to get a location of the reviewer, too.
--
We are geeks. Resistance is voltage over current.

[Joe Bernstein]

Well, since I'm in Seattle, depending on which connection I'm using,
I'm actually in Canada too, which is one reason I'm aware of this issue.
(I've repeatedly been informed that I can't watch some show on some
streamer because they don't have the rights for my country, and they
don't mean the US when they say this.)

The other is plenty of talk on the K-drama blogs about which streaming
services have rights in which countries, or more accurately, how much
it sucks to try to follow K-dramas via the streaming services outside
the US. So I've actually made a list of English-speaking countries [1]
in hopes of finding a way to sort out access for each by the time I
post, though this is one of the more challenging tasks. [2]

But I'd assumed this situation reflected the Korean networks'
considerable cluelessness re exports [3], and am flabbergasted to hear
that a company as Hollywood-centric as Netflix has these issues for
*non*-Korean stuff, mostly made by more export-clueful people.

As long as I'm posting here I'll note that twitch.tv turns out not to
bill itself as streaming TV shows at all, let alone K-dramas, and lacks
several popular K-dramas that pretty much all the streamers that pay
attention to K-dramas have. So it won't be on my list.

Joe Bernstein

[1] I started from Wikipedia's list of countries by English-speaking population, picking those with over 1 million native speakers. I then
pseudo-corrected Wikipedia - someone on it had at one time inserted
bullshit numbers meant to make the Philippines much more anglophone
than they actually are, but there are no genuinely good data available.
So the list turned out to be: US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand,
Ireland, and South Africa, where the anglophones speak more or less
standard English; and Jamaica, Nigeria, Trinidad and Tobago, and
Singapore, whose anglophones speak creoles, but whose educational
systems are all conducted in standard English.
A linguist friend of mine didn't believe it about Singapore, but it
turns out families in more than one of the local language communities
have been raising their kids as native English speakers, seeing
advantages in it, for long enough that a substantial part of the
population now reports English as their native language on censuses.
There are a bunch of studies of the "Singlish" actually meant by this.
I was really surprised to learn that there aren't a million native
anglophones in India. Apparently the "Anglo-Indians" are a much
smaller community than I'd thought.

[2] I know there are services out there meant to hide or spoof your
location, but don't know anything about how to find them, nor whether
they're set up to work for someone actually in the US who wants to
pose as, say, Nigerian. Anyone got any pointers?

[3] Region 1 DVDs of K-dramas normally have neither Spanish nor French
subtitles, though they may have Chinese ones. At least one K-drama
streaming service was originally set up to serve *only* US customers.
I have yet to find, in my searches for DVD issues of K-dramas, *any*
issued specifically for Region 2. Need I go on?