Hacker Cinema
This Is Us
2016 · TV series · 6 seasons
Created by Dan Fogelman
Follows the lives and families of three adults living and growing up in the United States of America in present and past times. As their paths cross and their life stories intertwine in curious ways, we find that several of them share the same birthday - and so much more than anyone would expect.
4 neutralfrom 4 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
4 comments on Hacker News
I recently watched This is Us and there's an episode on the Challenger explosion. It shows kids in middle school watching the event and it was uncannily exactly as I remember the experience watching it happen in 8th grade.
Housewives as main characters are featured in most of ABC's shows, including at one point all of their Wednesday comedy block alongside Modern Family. Similarly, Fox has had housewives as main characters on most of their animated sitcoms, and with rare exceptions their occupation is not treated as a joke. On NBC's most popular show (This is Us), the lead female character is a housewife.
> forecasts a future where streaming companies slowly increase their prices as bad as the cable television companies of yore.
Seems like this all has to do with how fungible consumers' preference for media is. If the viewers have to see the newest Disney film or the most recent season of a hit sitcom, then those who own the content can extract their pound of flesh. When a media property is strong enough that consumers demand it by name, it's a monopoly product with monopoly pricing power.
But if consumers show even a little flexibility, that puts drastic downward pressure on media prices. "We don't have This is Us... but we do have a very cheap back catalog of Grey's Anatomy that we think you might like just as much..." Now content becomes a commodity, and margins become razor thin. The surplus gets re-allocated and divided between cheaper consumer prices and those who own the algorithm. Netflix became the biggest media company in the world based on the strength of its algorithm not its media property.
One reason that cable company prices got out of control is because there was no effective mechanism for content fungibility. Higher prices were driven by ever higher carrier fees. If Comcast gets in a standoff with Bravo, it will always lose. A large segment of consumers demand Bravo, and Comcast had no way to deliver then any sort of satisfactory alternative. So carriers fees marches higher, which then in turn meant that consumer prices marched higher, since the cable companies were a monopoly themselves.
In the near-term the specific countours of the landscape and machinations of the business may push prices up or down. But in the long-run, algorithms are only getting better. There's no countervailing force making media branding stronger over time. The end-result has to be that the cost of media content asymptotically approaches its marginal cost: zero. Or more likely content just become a subsidized subsidiary of the tech gatekeepers that own the algorithms.
What a wonderful idea!
I've used it with an episode of "This is Us" (to Arabic, which I'm currently studying) and it works perfectly well.
Suggestions:
1. Please make it possible to review the original and the translation side by side (i.e. an "overview" button).
2. Also, don't block the UI when pausing. I.e. make it possible to scroll back & forth.
3. Allow controlling speed.
* I know it's suppose to be synchronized with what's playing at the same time, but it's needed when you can't read fast enough. Might need to provide a way to catch-up and jump to the current position automatically (keeping running time while in paused mode) .
4. Maybe consider allowing a users to submit (quality) translations (could be hosted elsewhere, if there's a legal problem). Lot's of really good stuff is not always available online (or not easily discoverable).
For example, was trying to watch "L'insult" (Lebanese) for which I know there are couple of (horrible) translations online, but Kontext was not able to find them.
5. Allow downloading a single merged file (original language + transaltion), if possible, for local viewing by users who download their own shows/movies.
Great job! Looking forward to see how it progresses.