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Television DRM

Amazon Debuts Mixed Bag of Original Comedy Pilots 67

Posted by timothy from the if-you-can-watch-them dept.
itwbennett writes "Amazon sent out a press release over the weekend announcing that the pilots for their original shows 'held 8 spots on the list of 10 most streamed Amazon VOD episodes.' So blogger and entertainment junkie Peter Smith decided to spend a couple of hours seeing if they were worth watching. He managed to sit through 4 of the 8 comedy shows and found a mixed bag — one a clear miss, two meh, and one he'd like to see turned into a series. Have you watched any of the pilots? What did you think?" The quality of these the pilots is not the only way they're a mixed bag: for many Linux users, they're simply not watchable. Watch soon for unknown_lamer's screed on the fat lot of good(will) Amazon is generating by making it harder to legally get these shows.
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Amazon Debuts Mixed Bag of Original Comedy Pilots More

Amazon Debuts Mixed Bag of Original Comedy Pilots

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  • Please no more sitcoms.................

    • no more sitcoms

      Like it or not, people love them. They're the TV equivalent of the RomCom [wikipedia.org]--predictable pleasure food that makes you feel good, and never challenges or surprises.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sycodon ( 149926 )

        "...predictable junk food..."

        Fixed.

        • Supanatural is hilarious. It's like a Venture Brothers take on the show Supernatural (and the like), but with female leads. It's a little rough around the edges, but I would absolutely tune in to that every week.

          FWIW, it's produced by comedian Kristen Schaal, of 30 Rock, The Daily Show, Bob's Burgers. If you like any of those shows, you should give it a shot.

          http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CBNPHDO [amazon.com]

          It's crystal skull o'clock.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by GTRacer ( 234395 )
        obFuturama: [FRY] But that's not why people watch TV. Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared.

        See? Even Fry knew why we're stuck with these things, and he's a thousand years in the future!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Would you rather more "reality" tv?

    • Please no more sitcoms.................

      I agree. No more reality shows. What we need is sitcoms!

      Actually, what we need is a halfway decent SF series. Whatever happened to that Star Trek reboot that was all hyped up a few years back? One flop wonder?

    • Some of my favorite shows are sitcoms. I actually would like to see them replace the reality TV filler. I liked "The Office", "Modern Family", and "30 Rock" most recently. I understand "Parks and Recreation" is good, but I haven't seen it yet.

      • I agree, I love smart intelligent television but sometimes you just kind of want to sit back and have a laugh sometimes without having to think about it.

    • You don't have to watch them.

    • Agreed, while people may love them, lets leave them on Network television which has become a vapid wasteland of derivative narratives for simple people

      There is no point for Netflix to duplicate network garbage. If Netflix can't rise above the average POS sitcom and crime scene show on networks then there is absolutely no point for Netflix to do original programming..

      Netflix should set the integrity of their original programming to not just be about ratings or top 10 lists, the way the network television ha

    • Well, at least sitcoms are better than reality TV.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • This is a follow-up. In the summary, "their original shows" cites the same Slashdot story you mention. You may have a valid complaint about how too many follow-ups makes a story look like a Slashvertisement, but a follow-up is not exactly a dupe.

  • Not watchable for many Linux users? (Score:4, Informative)

    by 00Monkey ( 264977 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @12:21PM (#43526021) Homepage

    Here's what I did in Ubuntu 12.04 to watch them:

    1. Use Firefox.
    2. Make sure Firefox is closed.
    3. Run: sudo apt-get install libhal1 hal
    4. Run: rm -rf ~/.adobe/Flash_Player/NativeCache ~/.adobe/Flash_Player/AssetCache ~/.adobe/Flash_Player/APSPrivateData2
    5. Launch Firefox and enjoy.

    After I did this in Firefox, I was able to watch them in Chromium too but ran into problems trying to get it working in the first place in Chromium. I've read that Google Chrome simply won't play them on Linux because of some recent changes Google made. So, yea... not as easy as it should be but it should be watchable unless I've missed a different reason why they're not watchable for so many users.

    • Re:Not watchable for many Linux users? (Score:5, Funny)

      by ColdWetDog ( 752185 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @12:30PM (#43526151) Homepage

      Well damn. If Ubuntu was a real Linux distribution then you would have at least needed to edit some configuration file by hand.

      World's going to hell in a handbasket, it is.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This didn't work on Damn Small Linux running on a Raspberry Pi, and I'M GOING TO YELL ON THE INTERNET ABOUT IT until someone fixes it!!!!!!

    • Let's talk about all the cargo-cult Flash "programmers" who just have to check if you're using the very latest version of Flash before you can look at their content - even though it doesn't use any new features...
    • Sounds like year of the Linux Desktop to me !

    • I've read that Google Chrome simply won't play them on Linux because of some recent changes Google made.

      Yeah, Ubuntu 13.04 has a weird dependency problem - I think it's Ubuntu's fault because it worked fine in 12.10. Looks like someone found a workaround [handytutorial.com] by downloading a .deb package from 12.10 and dropping it on 13.04.

  • Watchable on Fedora 17 (Score:3)

    by Rick Richardson ( 87058 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @12:31PM (#43526189) Homepage
    Watchable on Fedora 17 with Firefox 20.  No issues at all.

  • A comedy I'd liek to see: (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    30 minutes of APK being cock-punched.

  • blogger? Entertainment Junkie? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Thornburg ( 264444 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @01:09PM (#43526731)

    So, this guy is trying to be at least semi-pro about this, and we're supposed to care what he thinks and says, but he can't be bothered to watch one episode each of eight different shows before writing an article about it?

    How long are these? I'm guessing an hour. You can't spend eight hours WATCHING TV before writing an article you're being paid for?

    And then it gets put up on Slashdot?

    Has online journalism/tech news fallen so low that this qualifies as worth a front-page mention?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mattyj ( 18900 )

      It's even worse. They're all half hour pilots, sans commercials, so 21-22 minutes long each. You can blow through them all in about 2.5 hours, though I only made it a few minutes into a couple of them before I had to turn it off. Some of these things were beyond terrible. One or two gems, though.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by libtek ( 902569 )
      What a foo! Why would he skip Onion News Empire?! This is the FIRST one I clicked, because it was the most attractive summary, and plus: IT'S TEH EFFIN ONIONZ!

    • I'm glad this got commented on. I'm a lazy bastard and I plan on watching more than 4x22 minutes of TV tonight.

      The front-page worthy news *IS* that this is what passes for news: "Journalists" are half-assed at best.

      This just in, you can get just as many page views (or more!) from an ill-informed opinion on half the story than you can for actually putting in the work. ...and by work, I mean watching fucking TV.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sootman ( 158191 )

      > Has online journalism/tech news fallen so low that
      > this qualifies as worth a front-page mention?

      "Coming up next: Which work better -- springy clothes pins, or the other kind?"

      -- Kent Brockman

    • Has online journalism/tech news fallen so low that this qualifies as worth a front-page mention?

      The editors on Slashdot were outsourced to 7 line perl scripts. This story had all of the right keywords, so it was posted. It's your fault, really. If you'd thrown more money at the site before this had happened, the site's editors could have been replaced by a 12 line perl script...

  • Stop complaining about DRM (Score:3)

    by Vrtigo1 ( 1303147 ) on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @01:30PM (#43527005)
    Until linux has something resembling a decent marketshare on the desktop, stop expecting publishers to care about or support it. It's simply not worth their time to devote the time of their engineering teams to support Linux when they're not likely to see a huge return on that investment.

    Most folks running Linux are smart enough to run a Windows VM if they want to watch Amazon videos, and if they don't want to because of pride or some other "belief", then that's THEIR decision.

    Also, I don't have any statistics, but I've got to believe that a large portion of Amazon clients are STBs, not computers.

    So, buy a STB that supports Amazon, or buy an OEM Windows license and spin up a VM.

    Now, if only Amazon would release an iOS app. That's a huge market segment that they're alienating by not having their content available. I want to be able to watch Amazon video on my phone just like I can watch Netflix and Hulu on my phone.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dan667 ( 564390 )
      that is why Steam has come to Linux. It has no future, right?
      • Steam has come to Linux because Valve has become very openly dissatisfied with Windows 8 and the direction DirectX is taking. I suspect that the SteamBox project played a large part in the decision to make a linux port, and I further suspect that that decision wasn't about enabling folks running linux to run steam nearly as much as it was about making sure linux was supported so when the SteamBoxes start rolling off the assembly line they can actually run Steam.

    • Um, you do realize you posted this to Slashdot, right? Linux support always matters here.

      The last time I posted something from my own website to slashdot, my webserver logs showed a solid 40% representation of Linux-based browsers.

      If you post article here that says "you can view this for free in your browser!", then linux support most definitely matters.

      • Linux support always matters here.

        Right, exactly. Hit the nail on the head. Linux support matters HERE. Not out in the rest of the world where it's about making money from a product instead of embracing open standards. I stand by my original statement. If it were financially advantageous for Amazon to invest the effort in creating a linux solution for their video platform, they would.

        Sure, they could probably make some money from folks running linux than would subscribe to Prime for the videos, but in the grand scheme of things, pr

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