Over the past week or so thanks to a recommendation by a friend, I have been exploring the catalogue offered by Pluto TV. A streaming service I had never heard of before. Streaming services seem to be marching ahead, recently the news carried a report that in the UK Netflix is no in more than 50% of homes in the UK and its competitors are growing in number.
Honestly it reminds me of cable/satellite TV and how they kept expanding, simultaneously flooding the market and also walling off content behind competing services or package deals within the same service. Overall, its not a very healthy for the audience. In the US, the situation has progressed to the point where there are dozens of free services that use adverts instead of the subscription model. Most of these are strictly US only, so VPNs have yet another use.
Though an exception is Pluto TV, you can get it in the UK on smartphone and Playstation 4. I was curious while my friend was telling me about, so downloaded it on the PS4 and checked it out. It wasn't a promising start, the service is split into two sections, a 24 hour live channel section, where content it's displayed in a series of channels on a timetable like regular TV, and an on demand section.
The TV section is the first section that the app opens up and it autoplays the current program on the first channel. Strangely the first channel is one dedicated to those "real" paranormal investigation shows, the second channel Pluto's BBC 2 is dedicated entirely to Dog the Bounty Hunter. Do you remember Dog? I wish I didn't. So not a great first impression, but I moved onto the on demand section, and I was somewhat pleasantly surprised.
The selection is surprisingly varied, in genre, prestige and quality. There is some absolute dreck on their like the Asylum knock offs, and Atlas Shrugged 1,2 and 3. But there are also some critically acclaimed programs that never appear on the more popular streaming services, and plenty of okay to above average films from studios and independents. Over two days I was able to see two movies I have tried to see for literal years, Carpenter's Dark Star and Fantastic Planet, and in addition the Japanese SF film Terra Formars, and I'm currently watching 1970s Australian The Cars that Ate Paris. Overall its a good service for fun schlock and other oddities.
How was the watching? Well, the streams were stable and in good quality. But the adverts? Well surprisingly pretty good, I despise advertising on normal television, but these were short and the ad breaks few, I think a 90 minute film has about 10 minutes of adverts. The only real issue is that the ad breaks can be a bit abrupt, but that's true of advertising on commercial television. It was surprisingly unobtrusive.
This is why I'm writing this out, I'm not being paid by Pluto TV (please, please get in touch, my rates are reasonable) I'm just honestly pleasantly surprised. I think streaming is here to stay, and I can only see two potential futures, one where a streaming platform successfully guts the competition and monopolizes it, or another where it continues to fracture. Either way, these smaller advertising based services will probably still be around in the cracks and market niches. So, I'd much rather have the Pluto TV model and its relative unobtrusiveness be the guide post. I shudder to think about a new media landscaped as commercialised as UK television, never mind US television.
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| Thanks to Pluto TV I finally understand these giant blue French people |
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