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Rosella Bowlan
I remeber the early days of Netflix streaming, where studios just dumped their whole back-catalogue of films we hadn't seen since 90's network broadcasts of them. Films that never had DVD releases, or were long OOP. It's how it all began. But then, of course, it worked, and networks took back their catalogues, made their own streamin services, and have proceeded to...not release most of what they own, once again. There's been a lot of talk about physcial media vs. digital, and somehow we're pretending that all these movies were readily avaialble on physical media back in the day, year in and year out, rather than most films disappearing, never to return, a few years later. Rental stores would have some, but it was a crap shoot. And at least you can still buy a LOVERBOY DVD on Amazon for $5-$10 or so. The digital equivalent of that being buying a VPN and seedbox service and torrenting that shit. There's even a 1080p digital rip available that way.
I suspect there\u2019s only a small number of people who realize this\u2014perhaps only the so-called Xennial micro-generation\u2014but long before Dempsey was Dr. McDreamy, he specialized in playing gangly, dorky kids who nonetheless have a surprising amount of success with beautiful women. Forget Batman and Han Solo\u2014this guy was my hero. I, too, had too much limb and not enough charm. I had game, it just involved roleplaying, a controller, or a ball.3
Maybe it\u2019s because Dempsey was in the news after People magazine belatedly named him their Sexiest Man Alive, but I recently found myself thinking about the first part of his career, which is the only part I actually care about.4 Young Dempsey taught me a lot about sex. You would probably go to jail for attempting anything his characters did in the 80s. But as the saying goes, \u201CWhen the student is ready, the teacher will appear.\u201D
I thought this was an interesting angle to explore while also making fun of myself in the process\u2014as we say in the biz, win-win\u2014but Loverboy isn\u2019t on any streaming service known to man. I\u2019ve checked them all, including some sketch-looking ones that are probably fronts for Chechen hackers. For all practical purposes, the film has ceased to exist. You can\u2019t even rent it anywhere.
My only recourse: Buy the DVD for $10. Amazon also carries the VHS, so I guess I could literally dust off my VCR and truly recreate the 80s experience. I\u2019m curious to rewatch the film, but not $10 curious. For that price, I might just watch some random snippets on YouTube and reconstruct the story via plot summaries and my own faulty memory.
Loverboy is far from the only film unavailable online. Earlier this year, Lifehacker published a list of 22 notable films you can\u2019t watch. In some cases, maybe that\u2019s a public service; I don\u2019t think anyone needs to see Kids again. But it really strains my brain that we have all these dumb streaming services\u2014far too many, in my opinion\u2014and there are still movies you can\u2019t watch even if you subscribe to them all.
There are economic reasons for all of this, of course. There\u2019s little incentive for the streaming services to pay for obscure back-catalogue titles. I mean, I doubt anyone else is googling Loverboy. But it isn\u2019t necessarily just about the money. Sometimes it\u2019s difficult to determine who the rights belong to.
Sorting through who controls which rights, and where they might be today (especially if a company has vanished), can get... complicated. A movie or show may not have licensed music for home video; a home video license may not cover streaming. Perhaps the most famous example of the latter issue is Beavis and Butt-head, which \u2026 has never had a proper digital release complete with all the music videos (plus accompanying wonderfully idiotic commentary) because MTV never secured the clips past broadcast.
I\u2019ve come to terms with the fact that I will never own a flying car or a real-life lightsaber. But the fact that I can\u2019t just fire up Netflix and watch young Patrick Dempsey woo a bunch of affection-starved women is just a real big disappointment. The internet was supposed to make everything better. But thanks to the internet, I don\u2019t even have a video store where I can rent Loverboy for $1.
I\u2019m a straight dude but I can probably think of a dozen men more deserving just off the top of my head; I guess the Sexiest Man award is transitioning into a lifetime achievement sort of thing. When can we expect Wilford Brimley to nab his posthumous trophy? I\u2019m still not over his performance in Cocoon, nor his second career pimping for the American Diabetes Association.
I received another email from Scribd soon after, filled with apologies. They told me that they would give me a three month free access to Scribd, and right after I received an email from Scribd that my account has been reactivated.
Is Scribd really the Netflix for books? Netflix allows you an unlimited access to all of their movies, tv-series, documenteries and so on. The only limitation is your area; the same content is not available in the US and the UK. But no matter how many series you binge-watch, Netflix will never make any of the series unavailable.
Scribd works kind of like Netflix in the way that it also has area limitations and not all of the same titles are available in all countries. But as detailed above, Scribd has another, major limitation. After a certain number of reads, you will no longer have access to any of the popular content in Scribd.
If you read ebooks on your tablet, laptop, computer or mobile and you listen to one or at maximum two audiobooks a month, Scribd could perfect for you. Scribd is cheaper than most audiobook services and you get the access to ebooks too which is not included in services like Audible.
I was looking for answers about this issue and I found this and is really disappointing how Scribd is working. it happens that I saved on my list 11 books for my school and all of the sudden all of my books disappear and say that are not available until a month later. what a waste of money.
I totally agree and I hope that maybe they will change their algortihm a bit more reader friendly when their customers start to be aware of this issue. Thank you so much for reading and commenting ?
Scribd claims that you can listen to unlimited number of audiobooks, yet after finishing several books you get a ban, because in their opinion it is unusual that you have finished several books and want to listen more. For Scribd it is normal (usual) only if you listen to a couple of books per month. They will shut you down when you are in the middle of a book. Very nice.
Hello! thank you, thank you, thank you for this really detailed post. I was going to subscribe to Scribd as English books do not come by easily in my local library, English being a foreign language here. If Scribd works as you say it does, it is not going to serve my needs. However, I will give it a try, keeping my eyes open for what you have mentioned. I have heard of some companies, namely the ones like Uber doing the same. So apparently, it is something prevalent. Thanks again
I was a few chapters in to a book that suddenly disappeared along with almost everything else on my listen list. I was so excited for this service and spent so much time adding things to my list bc I miss going to the library so much. Then they are all unavailable for a month?! No way. Cancelling.
This is the same experience I am having! I am so frustrated! I use probably 5-6 audiobooks per month as well and I all of a sudden cannot find ANY authors I prefer! None! Have you found a better option for audiobooks?
A close friend of mine is a recently published author and I was surprised to find her book on Scribd last night. She had no idea that it was available there, and I was concerned that there may be a copyright violation so I took it upon myself to research it. In the process I found this great post, but before this I found what I think may explain the maddening experience that you and your readers have had.
So @paulina, when you suspected that something happened after you hit 60% of a book you probably nailed it. At some point you triggered a royalty payment which immediately made your free trial anything but free to Scribd. Now play this out when you start paying: Knowing what my friend is paid for each copy of her book, the month in which you read it your $11.99 subscription would immediately become unprofitable to Scribd.
It stands to reason that to limit their loss on your account, Scribd will immediately limit you to titles that have much lower or no royalties. Since royalties per book are all over the map, this might happen after one or more reads past the trigger percent of each book.
Over the weekend, without telling users, Netflix decided to stop displaying all titles from users instant watch queue if the rights to stream the content has expired. In the past, these titles remained in the queue and if they were to expire soon, they would also list the date when they would no longer be available for streaming. While Netflix took to their blog on Saturday saying they made this change to, "make the instant Queue easier to manage", clearly all they are trying to do is hide the fact that so many titles are expiring.
Even though Netflix says they didn't actually remove any of the titles from the queue and that they will reappear once again if they get the rights to stream the title, the fact is users can no longer see them, or manage them. And since most of us probably don't remember what all those titles were, how are we suppose to add them to our DVD queue since they are no longer available for streaming? Not to mention, the titles that we can longer see in our queue, count towards the limit of 500 titles you can have in your queue at any one time. So if we can't see them, how are we suppose to delete them so that we can add more titles to our queue?
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