Presto goes poof!

We never intended to have three subscription streaming services.

When we first got to Australia, we had none -- well, no legal ones anyway. We still had our American Netflix subscription, but we had to connect via VPN, something they had yet to crack down on. Then Netflix entered the Australian market and we could just use it without any adjustments to our account -- only an adjustment to our expectations, as there was a significant disparity between the amount of available content.

We signed up to Stan for reasons I can't fully remember -- cheap price, available content, it being an exciting new Australian-owned venture, something like that. And indeed it made a useful complement to Netflix, especially once Netflix got hip to the use of a VPN and blocked access to the American-only content.

Presto was meant to be a very targeted, very short-term relationship on our part -- in fact, I think we only meant to use a month's free trial and then drop it. It seems strange to recall it now, considering how much we ended up liking the show -- not very much -- but we got Presto primarily because it was carrying Mr. Robot. We thought Mr. Robot was going to revolutionize our lives, I guess. It didn't. In fact, it took us months to even get around to watching the final episode of the first season.

Needless to say, that meant we kept the service, in part because we ended up watching plenty else on it. In fact, it seemed to be getting better new/recent releases than either Stan or Netflix, and it had a number of shows my wife wanted to binge as well. (She's the TV binger of the family while I'm the movie binger.)

However, in just two days it's going poof!, maybe not as suddenly as it arrived, but with as little a trace as before it was in our lives.

We've gotten a good six weeks of warning, hence the lack of suddenness, but yes, it's leaving the Australian landscape and making our streaming lives a little less complicated. It struggled to gain momentum originally, and then it kind of did, but then they decided to subsume its offerings into the Foxtel cable service, probably in an attempt to make Foxtel even more dominant than it currently is.

I'm a little sad to see it go.

Yeah, I've had my fun at Presto's expense -- it never felt like it was ready for primetime, either in terms of its presentation or its browseability -- but the truth of the matter is, I've used it for movies as much as I've used Netflix for movies lately (though Netflix has greater overall viewing time because of its original content). And when I heard it was closing its doors on February 1st, I had a list of relatively recent releases that still felt like "good gets" that I wanted to watch first, among them Legend (2015 version), Rock the Kasbah, The Theory of Everything and 45 Years. (I didn't say they were "great movies," just "good gets.")

The one of those that most qualifies as a great movie, probably, is 45 Years, and I did indeed squeeze it in before the deadline. Didn't love it as much as it was hyped, but it gets a solid four stars from me.

Why the "squeeze"? Well we've also been plowing through the most recent completed season of The Walking Dead, which seemed like another "good get" for the service. It wasn't necessarily what we wanted to spend most of our Christmas season watching, but at least now it's late January and we're almost done with it. (Last episode is tomorrow night, also the last night of the existence of the service.)

Enforced consolidation does seem like a good thing, though. To speak of the "limitations" of any streaming service is to forget the hundreds of available movies on each that you haven't seen. And now that my 2016 film watching is over, I can choose any of those hundreds of available movies on Netflix and Stan.

As for Presto in all its purple-hued glory ... we'll wish it goodbye by looking back to when it was just saying hello:

And in case we get lonely with "only" two streaming services ... well, Amazon Prime just made its big Australian debut last month, opening a whole new can of worms.

Still working out the kinks

The lesser of two Australian streaming services we subscribe to is called Presto, and it's a bit of an odd duck.

Oh, it walks like a streaming service and it quacks like a streaming service, but around the edges that duck is a bit ... daffy.

One example: When you are done watching a particular piece of content, it doesn't offer you up any additional suggestions, or as in the case of Netflix, actually start playing you the next thing it thinks you're most interested in watching.

Instead, it offers the following option:

In case you can't read what that says, it's "Replay."

We thought it was weird enough when we were watching episodes of Mr. Robot, the availability of which was the reason we subscribed to Presto in the first place. (Too bad we didn't end up liking the show very much.) I mean, who would come to the end of a television program and then decide they're just going to watch the same program all over again, immediately?

But it's even weirder with feature length content, such as Black Dynamite, which I watched last night. I could see watching the same TV show twice in a row if you think you missed a nuance or something. The time commitment would be comparatively minimal. But the same movie twice in a row? I can only think of two times in my whole life that I've done that, and they were unusual circumstances.

Still, I suppose Black Dynamite is fun enough that I might have watched it twice in a row. Unlike most parodies, it doesn't wink. This is a loving lampoon of blaxploitation films that doesn't only look like a genuine film from the 1970s, but its absurdities are all within the realm of what a cheap blaxploitation film might actually contain. There are no Zucker-Abrahams style cutaways or instances of breaking the fourth wall. It's just an awesomely bad and incredibly fun movie with bad acting and bad dialogue that are intentional, but so subtly intentional that you really could mistake it for the genuine article. Knowing that it isn't just makes you admire the skill that went into it all the more.

I plucked Black Dynamite out of a kind of mind-boggling array of films that Presto has on offer. It's a lot more films than Netflix has these days, and possibly even more than the generous quantity on Stan. So I kind of hope Presto does work out the kinks in its presentation in time to really compete with those services, because right now, it's running a very distant third in Australia. And services that run a distant third either reimagine themselves as a niche product with lower overhead, or just cease to exist altogether.

It may not matter whether Presto gets its act together or not because my wife and I have already decided to cancel it. In fact, only because of Mr. Robot and one or two other shows my wife has now almost finished watching did we even add a third streaming service in the first place. Two is more than enough, and we don't want to just be throwing money away. In fact, the experience of subscribing to Presto has really been little more than a very expensive way to slowly wade through Mr. Robot. It took us like two months to finally watch the finale.

Suffice it to say that we definitely didn't care to replay any of those episodes.