Grand Tour 'Most Illegally Downloaded TV Show In History' (theguardian.com) 218
Jeremy Clarkson's new motoring show has become the most illegally downloaded television programme in history, figures suggest. Amazon paid a reported $160 million for three series of The Grand Tour, which stars former Top Gear presenters Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, after Clarkson was sacked by the BBC in March 2015. From a report on The Guardian: But figures from Muso, data analysts of the piracy market, suggest unprecedented numbers of people are avoiding paying $90 a year to sign up for Amazon's online streaming service, Amazon Prime, and instead downloading the show illegally. The data, shared with the Mail on Sunday, suggests the first episode was downloaded illegally 7.9m times, the second 6.4m times and the third 4.6m times. British viewers made up the largest percentage (13.7%) of the total number of illegal downloads.
Morality has gone down the tubes (Score:5, Funny)
Morality has gone down the tubes.
People inviting friends over to watch television, and not compensating the content creators.
People using sling, and other illegal "time shifters" to avoid paying compensation.
People inviting other people to watch their streaming content, and not compensating the content creators.
People sharing their netfix passwords with other people, and depriving people of compensation.
People "archiving" and "ripping" CDs, instead of purchasing multiple copies, people are not getting compensated.
Look in the mirror to find out the reason the economy is down the tubes, dirty pirates.
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"There appear to by 4 people in your living room, do you agree to the extra $2.50 streaming surcharge?"
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And then pauses the advertisements while you take a piss.
Re: Morality has gone down the tubes (Score:2)
Re: Morality has gone down the tubes (Score:2)
Made up numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
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You can join a torrent swarm and track connections. I am sure there's some padding/estimating going on, but they can at least get a relative scale here.
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You'd have to join *every* torrent/tracker/swarm to get within an order of magnitude or two. Even the private ones.
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The vast majority are covered under 1 or two torrents. You overestimate how many are using private trackers.
They don't have to be accurate to claim a certain number of downloads - there can certainly be more - but there's no reason to believe this show in particular has more torrents or more downloaders on private trackers than average. They can still safely say "most downloaded" with the data that they have.
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You think they don't have access to "private" trackers?
Private trackers fall into 2 categories:
A - "Private" with content and users and spies. They send out invite waves to maintain a user base, but they invite people with no verification of who they are.
B - Private with nothing on them because they're actually private and have very few users.
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All that you are saying is that their figure might be low, as they haven't joined *every* torrent swarm.
Not really refuting the logic, I'm afraid.
Not availiable in most of the world (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not only that, but the Prime Video system has components in place that let them rent/sell individual episodes of a series. Why not set a price and take people's money? Obviously people out there like it, but it's not worth $99 for 1 year's worth of temporary access.
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Not only that, but the Prime Video system has components in place that let them rent/sell individual episodes of a series. Why not set a price and take people's money? Obviously people out there like it, but it's not worth $99 for 1 year's worth of temporary access.
haha they'll probably put it at a tenner an episode so you end up paying 120 if you want them all....and you only get to watch them for a week
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Even if they did that, you could pay $10 for one episode to find out whether you like it or not. A lot better than paying $99 for the same.
Re:Not availiable in most of the world (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't consider it an excuse to pirate it
I do. Artificially limiting human creations even against those willing to pay for it is number one on my excuses to pirate, copy, or fake something.
I mean what's the moral objection to this? You're not depriving someone of money if they are unwilling to take it.
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#1 is double- (or triple-) charging people for stuff they've already paid for on vinyl, tape, CD, videotape, or DVD. They argue that we aren't buying the product, we're merely licensing it - OK, I can accept that. But then they argue we need to buy a new license just to get the same product on a different medium, and they won't give us a discount if we wish to upgrade from an earlier medium? How in the world does that make any sense? Even the software industry re
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Wasn't Top Gear one of the most pirated shows already? It was only available on the BBC but was popular far beyond that.
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TopGear was (is?) sold for re-broadcast in more countries than just about any other TV show, ever.
According to Wikipedia, "Top Gear was broadcast in 214 different countries by the end of 2014", which seems a bit high, but might be due to how regions were counted in contracts by the BBC and the publicist.
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How much of a delay was there? I know BBC America lagged behind the BBC's airings. The casual watcher may have waited until the latest episodes came to them 'naturally' but the Top Gear torrents were always quite popular the night they aired.
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I live in Canada and get it through Prime Video.
You have to jump through hoops the first time but seems like they aren't like Netflix and doing regional checking at least on their Roku App.
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Could you share how you got it on Roku? I just bought a Roku here in Canada and the Amazon Video channel is not available, would be great to watch it on the Roku (I have Canadian Prime).
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It's the movie studios and their insistence on geographic market segregation which makes this impossible. The want the streamed version of a movie to come out no sooner than Dec 12 in the U.S., Dec 26 in the UK, Jan 4 in Germany, Feb 1 in Australia, March 1 in Japan, and May 1 in China. Multiply that by every movie and every country on Earth, and it becomes a logistical nightmare for any
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More illegal... (Score:2)
I always thought that laws were binary. Either you are breaking a law or your aren't. How can something be more illegal than something else?
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Interesting numbers (Score:2)
I haven't watched the show, even though I guess I could because I have Amazon Prime, It's interesting to me that 1.5 million downloaded the first episode and didn't want to download the second. Then almost 2 million more downloaded the first 2 episodes and didn't want to download the third. Is this version of the show much worse than the series that was so successful?
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Flexget and other download tools can easily be set to grab all premier episodes. This helps explain why the first episode has such high numbers. A lot of people downloading it, but not watching it. It doesn't explain the ep2 to ep3 drop though. Maybe some people decided to pay for prime (Amazon's wishful thinking).
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I watched the first three- first was OK, 2nd was horrendous, 3rd was horrendous.
I have no intention on watching the 4th. It feels stale and over-rehearsed and over-scripted compared to their time on Top Gear. On Top Gear, you knew it was all fake, but their reactions seemed spur of the moment comments. On GT, it feels like they're reading from a teleprompter:
"Stage Direction: Look surprised and say, 'Oh No, Hammond is in a Dodge'"
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Is this version of the show much worse than the series that was so successful?
So far, yes. But it is also improving rapidly. Episode 1 was crap. Episode 2 was worse. Episode 3 was pretty good. Episode 4 was quite good. If we are lucky, Episode 5 will be really quite good. I am not alone in this, either; I've participated in the official Fb TGT comment threads and if you've got your finger on the pulse, you know this is how it's gone so far.
People who are complaining that this show is "more scripted" than Top Gear are completely clueless. Top Gear was almost completely scripted. Even
That's a lot of disappointed people (Score:4, Insightful)
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It was embarrassing and also unnecessary. The killings of if the 'famous guests' are repetitive and unnecessary. The fat American driver shitting on every car he drove so far is unnecessary and embarrassing. The entire show seems unnecessary and embarrassing, but it is dies look pretty. So it is an unnecessary and embarrassing pretty thing, like Suicide Squad, unnecessary and embarrassing with some pretty (Robbie Margot) in it.
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> The fat American driver shitting on every car he drove so far is unnecessary
Actually I think it is necessary to avoid a suit by the BBC. Something about not being allowed to have a faceless silent racing driver doing the laps so they are maliciously complying with the agreement. Same with the celebrity kill-off bits. They're probably doing it to hew to the wording of the agreement worked out and also give the Beeb lawyers the finger. Which is also why James said "Oh Cack!" in the latest ep. If he
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I disagree, I don't think they're copying the old format entirely, from what I've seen of it so far they're using the old formula as a template and trying new things with it. That said it's been hit or miss so far. The special forces thing was dreadful and scripted all to hell, but there's promising signs elsewhere, like the latest episode with the eco-cars. So far I am still in watch and see mode.
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They have too much money now. Top Gear was at its best when they bought clapped out old once-great cars for a grand, and then broke down a lot. All the best jokes were just off-the-cuff banter between the three off them, not the scripted crap they have now.
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$90/year for one season of a show? (Score:2)
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So, either you are of very limited understanding, or you have constructed the most specious of strawmen.
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Not really. I don't shop from Amazon often enough to get any value from the "two day shipping" (and the stuff I do buy is obscure enough that it gets cancelled about a third of the time anyway), and I can pirate all the IP content for free. So...I look at people who fork over the $100/year as chumps.
Downloaded more that Game of Thrones? (Score:2)
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Industry propaganda... (Score:2)
These are not "illegal downloads." Downloading isn't illegal. *Sharing* and distributing it is (in some jurisdictions). The are also failing to account for those of us who have Amazon Prime subscriptions, but CANNOT VIEW the show because Amazon refuses to make their proprietary player available on Android TV. Amazon is the real criminal here.
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Downloading is certainly illegal, unless you have a license for the copy then it is a grey area. Put down the crack pipe, seriously, you are only making yourself dumber.
It's the DRM (Score:2)
After all there is no legal way to watch that show without giving away our basic freedoms of "Privaccy and Integrity of Information processing systems" as declared by the German constitutional court in 2008.
Offer it as a DRM-free downloadable copy and people will buy it in hordes.
The number may be BS but.. (Score:2)
It would be nice if more people had a choice (Score:2)
Amazon Prime in Canada costs $79, but AFAIK, it doesn't include access to Grand Tour. If it does and I've got it wrong, there's still a huge number of Top Gear fans in a lot of countries who don't have a legal option for getting the show.
So yeah, a lot of people are going to looking for torrents. Quelle surprise.
Re:Just illegal downloads? (Score:5, Funny)
What if you watch it at a friend's house.. does that count?
You really should be paying for even thinking about it.
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I bought a bottle of wine with me. Is that ok?
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I bought a bottle of wine with me. Is that ok?
As long as you've paid the multiple drinkers fee.
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I wouldn't bother... it's not that good anyway. First episode showed promise, but since then it just feels very wooden and overly scripted.
I know Top Gear was always scripted and fake, but the new Amazon version of it with Clarkson, et al. just seems way over-rehearsed and wooden. I was really looking forwards to it but feel majorly let down.
Re:Make it cheaper (Score:5, Interesting)
The 2nd episode felt overly scripted, but the 3rd and 4th felt more like Top Gear was. We were laughing through the entire episodes (though they can probably just get rid of the joke of killing off celebrities every episode).
Re: Make it cheaper (Score:3, Funny)
It's not the same without Chris Evans.
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It's not the same without Angela Rippon.
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The 2nd episode was just plain bad... 3rd and 4th are showing promise again. Hammond in the Challenger had me laughing so much! And yes, the killing celebrities bit got old in the 1st episode and is just stupid. We get it already.
Re:Make it cheaper (Score:4, Insightful)
Hammond in the Challenger just seemed too much like a badly scripted, badly acted sitcom. None of their reactions seemed genuine.
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Perhaps, but maybe I just identified with his giggling grins lighting up the back tires...
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Agreed. I know they've set up Hammond as "the American" on the team, what with his penchant for muscle cars and dislike of snails, but this was going way too far into absurdity. It was a harsh caricature lacking any sincerity and was just unnecessary and embarrassing.
I really hope they hit their stride, but so far I'm not sure they will. The celebrity killing bit should have ended after the first episode and the new Stig who is definitely not the Stig is neither funny nor clever. Most of the show comes
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They should have kept the format, changed names were required, and carried on.
That's what they are doing. Instead of the quiet Stig, its the loudmouth american. Instead of the studio, they have the tent. Instead of SIARPC, they have "Celeb Mind Whatevertheheck"... instead of "The News" they have "Conversation Street". It's changed enough(according to the lawyers) so that the BBC can't go after them.
I would go so far as to say, they'd do a complete exact copy of the show if they could get away with it... but this is what we are stuck with for now.
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That's interesting, I myself, wouldn't ever consider shelling out $99/yr or whatever it is, just for one show to watch.
But I have been an amazon Prime member for many years, likely almost as long as the program has been offered. I like the 2-day shipping, and the Amazon Radio and Prime video offerings and free ebooks, etc they offer are nice p
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My only hope is, that Amazon doesn't ever open a distribution or other brick and mortar physical presence in my state, and force me to start paying sales tax for purchases from them.
Don't hold your breath. Utah just negotiated a deal with Amazon [sltrib.com] to voluntarily collect sales taxes for the state even through Amazon does not have a physical presence in Utah. In return, Amazon gets to keep 1.31% of taxes collected [deseretnews.com] (with allowances of up to 18% according to the law).
With $29 million unpaid sales taxes for Amazon sales to Utah in 2015, that's $400,000 of free money for Amazon. This kind of deal will spread like wildfire to other states.
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you realize you're supposed to report that on your state income taxes and report it for use tax...
It's not tax free, it's that you're not following tax law and no one is enforcing it (but if they decided to you're in a world of hurt).
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How can you watch that stupid special ops crap more than once? Heck I couldn't even stomach it the first time. I skipped over after they ran the same joke way past the punchline. To quote Monty Python, "GET ON WITH IT!!!"
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And I laugh when they smack jezzer in the head with a shovel
Well... yeah. :-)
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I found the fourth episode really dull and contrived.
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I missed the first two and watched the 3rd with some friends. I think the only spontaneous moment in the whole episode was the bloke in the audience shouting out "Brown Aston" in response to something Clarkson said. Nothing really amused me*, the constant repeating of Hammond doing doughnuts & reving in tunnels and May's "nervous tick". The cinematography was stunning, but it could have been filmed in literally any country - they have this huge budget and did nothing (apart from a small opera bit) that
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To me it doesn't feel like Top Gear was.
Recently someone here described the formula as: You have 3 guys, of which 2 are constantly forming a team to play on the third person. They are switching teams continuously, so each of the 3 is 2/3 of the time part of the winning team.
The cars are just dressing on the cake of this dynamics between the 3 guys.
In the new episodes they changed it to American style, probably under pressure from Amazon. Jeremy Clark plays the role of the winner, James May has the loser rol
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I'll agree with you. ep2 was as described -- and I was worried that ep2 was going to set precedence for what future episodes were like. ep4 seemed let Capt Slow go off and be his own (so far he's really been odd-man-out with Jeremy and Hammond leading the show). The show has gone from from Improvised "Curb your Enthusiasm" to Scripted "Stand here on this mark and read your lines." And TGT is somewhere in between- still waiting for them to be set free. But hey - they are writing this right?! Needs
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I wouldn't bother... it's not that good anyway. First episode showed promise, but since then it just feels very wooden and overly scripted.
I know Top Gear was always scripted and fake, but the new Amazon version of it with Clarkson, et al. just seems way over-rehearsed and wooden. I was really looking forwards to it but feel majorly let down.
Are you sure you're not referring to Top Gear USA or the post-Clarkson Top Gear?
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All the above, and Grand Tour.
Seems the formula is harder to replicate than many people thought.
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I actually found the last season of Top Gear with Clarkeson was almost phoned in.
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The first episode was downloaded illegally 7.9m times, the second 6.4m times and the third 4.6m times.
That's a pretty severe falloff given they aren't paying to watch it. Doesn't bode well for the show's continued success.
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Well, I downloaded three different torrents of E01 until I found one where both the audio and video were of acceptable quality, for E02, the second torrent was good enough, and by E03 I'd worked out which sources were not screwing up the encoding...
I suspect I'm not alone in this, so unless the "illegal download" figures have already taken this into account, extrapolating anything from the trend is a waste of time.
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it's fucking smooth as silk compared to plank of wood "leblank" and "evans"
fuck knows why BBC kept "leblank" he was just as shit as "evans"
Fuck knows what you think quotation marks are for.
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This is what they get for making it exclusive when they have infrastructure in place to let people pay/download by the episode.
Re:Make it cheaper (Score:4, Insightful)
"Sign up problem
You may continue with this billing address, but Prime Video streaming, Prime Music, and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library won't be available outside of the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Prime shipping benefits are available to shipping addresses in the contiguous U.S."
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Get a free VPN for 1 month, register and then don't use the VPN anymore.
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Huh. So if you visit the UK, you won't be given access to Amazon Prime Video, despite that it's available in the UK?
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Maybe the solution here would be to offer Amazon videos separately from the prime membership? Make it cheaper for people who don't want one of the two functionalities, and offer a combined discount to those who want both. That said, there is probably a reason (good or not, but well-thought in any case) behind the current offering.
They sort of do that already. Its called Amazon Prime Video and you can pay for it monthly (£5.99 pm in the UK). Its not really a saving if you pay for the full year, but you can cancel at anytime. I'm pretty sure they also offer a 30 day free trial, so for those that care just wait until the whole season is online then sign up for that.
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I find using prime to be a pain in the ass. In order for me to easily view prime I need to open it on my phone and then airplay it to my TV. The fact that they refuse to support non amazon set top boxes for their streaming service makes it much more difficult. I have prime for the shipping advantages and im not going to get rid of it or anything but I rarely use the video at all because of how hard it is for me to get and buying a fire stick or some other device just to stream the few shows they offer ju
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Streams just fine on my Roku
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Streams just fine from my Xbox One.
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Your argument would make sense if watching Grand Tour was the *only* thing you could do with a Prime subscription. But it's not, so I have no idea what you're even rambling about.
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Their argument still makes sense because Amazon can rent/sell TV episodes already with their Amazon Video system. They refuse to and made it exclusive.
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Noone is forcing you to. Just plug in some old rabbit ears to the back of your TV, and get all the free TV you want. Of course, you'll miss out on the shows like Game of Thrones, Vikings, Orange is the new Black, Wentworth, etc that are exclusives, but you can always just subscribe to one service, watch what they have, then cancel and switch to another, rotating every few months. You'll get them all, eventually, if a year or two after they air.
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I don't want to sign up to ten difference services so I can watch one series/sport on each one of them.
Then... don't?
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Well, instead of paying for 10 - 10.00 a month subscriptions to watch what you want commercial free, you can instead pay 200 bucks a month for hundreds of ad infested channels spewing tons of unwatchable crap.
it's called cable television!
Or you can just go to tpb and get the pick of the worldwide crop for free.
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Haven't seen it yet, but I have high hopes for it.
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I am not sure Amazon is unhappy with the current situation. The word that used to apply to a program like the Grand Tour is 'traffic builder': it causes people to join, to enter, to get a subscription. Once they are in they can buy other things. So how many subscriptions has Amazon gotten out of TGT already? That number is what they're interested in. The illegal/indirect viewers are interesting because these are a potential extra source of income.
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That seems a fair analysis as well, especially given that Amazon doesn't seem to have weighed in on the topic yet.
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So what else am I supposed to do? There are features missing from Prime in Canada and this is one of them.
I do appreciate the way they are touting it as a global show, different country each week and all that, but apparently unless you actually live in the US you can go fuck yourself.
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I do appreciate the way they are touting it as a global show, different country each week and all that, but apparently unless you actually live in the US you can go fuck yourself.
The plan is to stream it in 200 countries. The BBC is probably being a PITA about distribution.
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I do appreciate the way they are touting it as a global show, different country each week and all that, but apparently unless you actually live in the US you can go fuck yourself.
The plan is to stream it in 200 countries. The BBC is probably being a PITA about distribution.
What does the BBC have to do with anything?
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Amazon is basically charging $90 to watch a show. Who in their right mind would do that?
I certainly wouldn't. But I would enjoy the fact that a show I want to watch is included with our Prime membership. The first couple of episodes sucked, but episode 3 was okay and episode 4 was pretty good.
I find that about half the time, the thing I want is cheapest on Prime, at least within a couple of bucks of the absolute cheapest price from the absolute sleaziest seller. And I live in the sticks where my choice of shopping venues for many items is between K-Mart and Wal-Mart, so even if I wanted to pay
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By and large, they have better content than Netflix as well. It's ruined by a godawful UI and mixing in paid shows with the free ones.
If Amazon cleaned up their UI I would drop Netflix. As it is, if I weren't getting Prime from my wife's .edu account, I'd be more likely to drop Prime despite the better content.
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There are a lot of apps available for Roku that aren't for the Apple TV. My recommendation would be to spend $35 and upgrade to one of the cheaper Roku models. Well worth it.
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