The realities of modern movie consumption

I probably don't need to write a lot about the screen shot I took when I was on our Australian streaming service Stan on Monday night, because it's pretty self-eplanatory. I was looking for something that -- yes -- did not require very much of my proactive mental engagement or my stamina, considering that it was actually my fourth movie of the day and I was starting it after 10 p.m. (Don't worry, I also got to the beach and went into the pool with my son, as well as made a mix and wrote a blog post. So it was a very productive day despite also featuring four movies.) And even though I selected only the 82-minute New Zealand film The Breaker Upperers, which I'd already seen and really liked, I did not make it through and still needed to finish it yesterday. 

But I didn't go specifically looking for such movies. This category presented itself to me within Stan's comedy section without me having to do anything.

It did make me wonder which movies they saw it fit not to include in this category. I'd like to know what their idea is of a sophisticated, requires-all-your-mental-acuity comedy. I suppose if Stan carried the Knives Out movies, and classified them as comedies, they might qualify.

As it was, the movies I saw while scanning were very similar to those in the categories "classic comedies," "frat pack comedies" and the humorously broad "funny films" -- which you'd hope would encompass any film in the comedy section. They did have a number of more useful categories like "indie comedies," "dark comedies," "rom-coms" and "bloody funny," that last being horror comedies. 

Even though I am, of course, disdainful of the idea of a movie you can watch while being on your phone throughout, I have to admit that I am not always avoiding the temptation to be on my phone during all the movies I watch. One movie I watched on Monday, I watched during the morning time slot, and I think being on my phone for part of it was an indication of my guilt and my sense that I should be doing something else at that time of the day. 

The streaming culprit has been identified

The only "Oscars homework" I did over the weekend was for pleasure. 

No, I didn't put in a last-minute viewing of any movies I might not have seen, in order to better make predictions about tonight's Oscars, or to feel myself more engaged in them.

Instead, I rewatched my favorite best picture nominee with my wife, which happened to be my #1 movie of last year.

And it looked great.

Yes, yet another post about The Substance on this blog, but I will probably retire the topic for a while now. I don't expect to talk about it much in the next piece, my annual "Oscar thoughts" piece, which will come many hours after the ceremony ends. Which is because for the first time in three years, the Oscars do not coincide with Labor Day here in Australia. That means I'm working today, and even after I finish work, I have two different sporting events to attend, one in which I'm just a spectator and one in which I'm participating. My 14-year-old has a basketball game at 6:05, and about a half-hour after that ends, I'll be playing tennis with my tennis partner. Then, sometime after 9 p.m. local time, I will finally watch the show.

Anyway, The Substance will come up in that post I'm sure, but possibly only in the context of Demi Moore winning, which I predict will happen. (And was reminded why she should win when I watched the film again.) After that, I'll probably put it in my personal penalty box for a while -- a term used by the hosts of Filmspotting when they've been talking about a particular movie too much. (This is my sixth post on The Audient to have gotten "the substance" as a content label.)

Before getting sidetracked, I said a few paragraphs ago that Coralie Fargeat's film looked great, and that's what I want to come back around to explain now.

A couple times in the past few weeks I have made mention of The Substance's pending arrival on my Australian streaming service Stan, and how I wasn't sure if I could watch it because the stream on Stan looked so shit. Of course, proper scientific testing ruled out Stan as the culprit, and seemed to rule in another culprit, Fetch, which is a sort of AppleTV-like product through which you play other streaming apps, such as Stan.

Wrong again.

On Thursday night I decided to do some further testing, as I really didn't want to have to hook up somebody's laptop to the TV through an HDMI cable in order to watch The Substance with my wife on Friday night. She had agreed to the viewing -- even to starting it just after 8 o'clock due to the length of the movie -- and this was my chance to get it right and make the experience involve as little pain as possible. Other than, that is, the pain, both physical and emotional, we would be seeing on screen.

So I took another stroll through my TV's various settings, both the TV itself and Fetch, and I just could not get a better idea of what to do. My 11-year-old was on the couch with me, and he put in his two cents as well. But not even the advanced technical knowledge of today's youngest generation could figure out the issue. 

Then I finally got the brainstorm that cracked the case: I needed to connect Fetch to a different HDMI port on my TV. HDMI 3 was available, as we only ever use it when the kids connect their Nintendo Switch to the TV, which they do less and less these days, as they are generally happy to just hold it in their hands. 

And suddenly, all of it -- Stan, Fetch and The Substance -- looked great. 

I do not, as of now, know why HDMI 2 looks so terrible and HDMI 1 and 3 look so great, but I also do not care. I just switched it to another port and voila, problem solved. That night I watched an old favorite, Shattered Glass, that was streaming on Stan, just to prove it was all better. And the movie looked good -- well, as good as a movie made in 2003, which was not particularly focused on looking good, could look.

I do know, now, that there is probably a setting I could tweak that relates to that HDMI port itself, a setting that is currently out of sync with the same setting on the other HDMI ports. But I have not bothered to figure that out yet.

The reason I know this is that HDMI 3 was once the red-headed stepchild of this TV's HDMI ports, because an incorrect setting in the aspect ratio was once cutting off some of the image on that port. For a long time I thought this was just a hardware error in the port, until one day I finally saw I could make an adjustment, and the port was back to performing at the same level as its brethren.

I know that HDMI 2 will someday be redeemed, but for now, it can just take a little break and sit in the corner to think about what it's done.

For a post posting on the actual day of the Oscars, I thought I should probably write a bit more about The Substance itself, so I will. However, as I was watching, I didn't know how I'd limit my thoughts to just a few. Things kept on popping up into my head, ways to name the piece, etc. I ultimately went with naming the piece after fixing the streaming issue, and I'll try to keep the rest of my thoughts fairly limited as well.

1) First, the rejected titles for this post, which I don't need to explicate at length, but you can probably imagine the things I might have said about the movie based on these titles. One was "The weirdest best picture nominee ever?" Which indeed, The Substance might be. It's crazy that a critical mass of people in the film community embraced this movie as a standard bearer for their brand. One was "A constant state of exhilaration," which was, indeed, the way I watched this movie. I think there was one other but I am forgetting it now.

2) On this viewing I particularly noticed some of the regular motifs that seem to be beyond the film's most obvious themes. One of my favorites was how Fargeat keeps going to insert shots of palm trees at night, which ends up being the final thing Elisabeth Sparkle lays her eyes on in this movie. They are at once an encapsulation of the glamor of a place like Los Angeles, and a sense of how it is distant, out of your reach. If you want to start spinning off into theories about this, it could be the idea that most of what's taking place in the film is a flashback, and the shots of the palm trees are what's occurring in Elisabeth's present tense as she confronts what happens to her at the end of the movie. This viewing convinced me that the movie is even more totally metaphor or totally fantasy even than I first thought.

3) If we are looking for more direct visual embodiments of the themes, I love the shot where Elisabeth sees the fly that landed in her former boss' glass of wine at their final dinner as colleagues. The fly is making strokes in the liquid at first, dutifully trying to escape from its watery death bed, until it inevitably consumes more sugary broth than it can handle and stops swimming. This is a world where you greedily drink in everything that is offered until it kills you, perhaps without even noticing that's about to happen.

4) The oppressive score stood out to me more on this viewing as well. The sort of harrowing metallic scratches that sound a bit like a biohazard alarm, those kind of sounds were the foundation of my now three-decade love affair with industrial music. (We're talking mostly Nine Inch Nails here, but I appreciate the imitators as well.)

5) Another rejected title for this post deserves its own separate entry. The title would have been something like "No problem with a big ending," because during the film, I realized that wild endings that don't work for everybody -- which is how my wife felt about this ending, despite saying she "really, really liked" the film -- don't seem to sidetrack me too much. I guess it depends on the circumstances, but I think both my #1 of 2018 and my #1 of 2020 -- First Reformed and I'm Thinking of Ending Things -- ended in ways that left some viewers perplexed, and may have ultimately turned them against the movie. For me, the ending of First Reformed is perfect, though I am a little less sold on both Ending Things and The Substance. With Charlie Kaufman's film, it's more "I love it despite the perplexing ending." With Fargeat's film, it's "I don't know if she needed to go that extra step" -- you'll know what I'm talking about if you've seen The Substance -- "but I'm glad she just decided to go all out." And this viewing made me sure I was glad. 

I actually think I had other things to say, but some of them have escaped my head. Besides, you know I love this movie. I thought it was important to let you know, though, that I may love it even more on the second viewing.

Because second viewings of favorite films do create some trepidation in us. What if it's not as good as I thought it was?

In the case of The Substance, it was as good as I thought it was -- in fact, it was better than I thought it was. All that time I spent slightly fretting about whether a better 2024 movie would come along was wasted fretting, because it should have been evident to me that this was my #1 from the moment I saw it. In fact, I'm now wondering if it has a serious leg up on other films from this decade -- something I think of now that we are closer to the end of the 2020s than the beginning. 

And fortunately, I had an excellent stream of it on Stan to help confirm that. 

Okay, now it's really time for The Substance to go in the penalty box. 

Stan claims a best picture nominee as its own

Stan was cleared of any wrongdoing in "the great Eat Pray Love streaming scandal" of earlier this month, but that doesn't necessarily mean all is well with the Australian streamer.

Except this time, I'm attacking them only for a silly marketing thing and perhaps a bit of excess and unwarranted pride.

You may recall, in the ultimately incorrect discussion of whether Stan streamed its movies at a sufficient quality (the fault with the poor stream lay elsewhere), that one of the things that gave me pause about unsubscribing from the service was that The Substance, my #1 of 2024, was about to start streaming there, and I really wanted to show it to my wife. It wasn't necessarily The Substance specifically that gave me pause, but the reminder that Stan has a definite benefit to me in that some movies become available there that aren't available on my other streamers, and may not be for some time. It being the #1 of my previous year just made for a quite prominent and well-timed example of that phenomenon.

My wife and I may watch it this coming weekend, but in the meantime, I came across the funny ad you see above.

You can read the surrounding content from one of my progressive news outlets, Daily Kos, if you want. But then come back to the ad.

Stan is calling The Substance a "brand new film." (More on my family's private joke about that particular phrasing later in the post.)

It's not the same as calling it a "Stan original film," which would definitely be a bridge too far. But the ad is attempting to deceive on some level, to take credit for a movie by implying a certain ownership or a certain exclusive right to make this film available to the world.

The Substance may be "new" in the broader, geological sense, and I would not harp on that phrasing if they just called it a "new film." But "brand" is a doubling down, a sense of underscoring its newness and pushing it out to the maximum end of that parameter. Something that's "brand" new, as opposed to just new, is something that you could not have accessed or experienced in any other way before now.

Not only is this patently wrong -- The Substance was released in Australia in September, having debuted at least a month before that at MIFF specifically and possibly at other festivals around the country, not to be mention becoming available for rental a couple months after that -- but even many casual readers of this ad would know it was wrong. 

If Stan has chosen to market The Substance heavily, as they should, it's because they know their viewers want to see it, as they should. But those viewers are inclined to see it because they have heard raves about it, and the more switched on of them -- they don't even need to be that switched on -- would know the movie has been nominated for multiple Oscars, including the top prize, and has already won a Golden Globe for Demi Moore's performance in addition to receiving several other nominations there. If you are even more switched on, you might be aware of the other awards it has won or where it has received nominations -- though by this point you'd probably be switched on enough to have already seen it.

So essentially, many of the people this ad is being pitched to would know it was trying to dupe them on some level, and that's not really a great place for any ad to be.

I said I'd get back to "brand new."

Stan has a lot of radio ads here for its offerings, and in that case they're more likely to be promotions of TV series, which likely still sell much better to customers than movies. The phrase "brand new" almost always makes its way into that ad copy, but a while back, at least a year ago, I noticed something about this ad copy that I pointed out to my kids, and especially the younger one brings it up regularly and thinks it's funny. 

While most people in the world contract those two words when they say them, so the D gets dropped and it sounds more like "brannew," the Stan ad copy reader went to broadcasting school, so of course he has to say the D. Which never doesn't sound awkward. He makes it sound less awkward because he's a professional, but try saying this out loud to yourself right there where your sit, only quietly, so the people around you don't think you're crazy. There's no way to pronounce the D in "brand new" without tripping up on the sound you are required to make in the middle and having the whole thing come out in sort of a sputter, when everyone knows what you're saying if you just say "brannew." In fact, I'd argue that if you say the D, it kind of doesn't actually sound like what you're trying to say, so rare is it. 

So when we call back to this, we always over-emphasize the sputtering D in the middle, like "bran-D-D-D-dnew." It never ceases to make us laugh. 

One final bit about The Substance while I have you, instead of creating a superfluous separate post on the topic. Actually two short bits:

1) I haven't read all the available writing on The Substance -- in fact, I haven't read 1% of it. But in the stuff I have read, I have never seen mentioned its similarity to a short film Coralie Fargeat made in 2014 called Reality+. A friend mentioned this similarity to me a couple days ago. Here is the plot synopsis for Reality+: 

"In a near future, the brain chip 'Reality+' acts on your sensory perceptions and allows you to see yourself with the perfect physique you've always dreamed of. All the people equipped with the chip can see your new appearance and you can see theirs. But the chip can only be activated for 12h a day..."

I almost snort-laughed to see how similar this is to The Substance, even down to the equal timeshare of the two modes. I can't necessarily use this as evidence of Fargeat's excessive fixation, since it's not uncommon for a director to build out an idea from one of their short films into feature length. I do think it's funny how little the concept has been modified. I don't watch a lot of short films but I may need to seek this one out.

2) Speaking of writing about The Substance, I just now noticed how much extra material there is in The Substance's Wikipedia entry, kind of like the written equivalent of all the DVD extras we used to get that expanded on how the film was made. I may have to set aside some time to read this at some point ... maybe either just before or just after the upcoming viewing with my wife. 

Taking the Pepsi Challenge with my streamers

I said in Thursday's post that I should not have chosen Stan as my streamer to watch Eat Pray Love. How right I was*, and how many other choices I didn't realize I actually had.

(*read on, there's more to this story)

Suspecting but never definitively proving that the video quality on Stan was worse than on my other streamers, I decided to do a little test. And the results of that test were definitive indeed (*but maybe not in the way I originally thought).

I'm calling it the "Pepsi Challenge," a bit of a misnomer but I'll explain my thinking.

In the actual Pepsi Challenge from the 1980s -- and was it this that prompted Coke to roll out the ill-fated "New Coke"? -- people tasted unidentified colas to determine which one they liked the best. There may have been more than two, or it may have just been Coke and Pepsi. Allegedly, a lot of people decided they liked Pepsi better. And, speaking of things that stayed in the zeitgeist, as I was when talking about Eat Pray Love, so did the Pepsi Challenge, as seen in such places as Pulp Fiction: "I'll take the Pepsi Challenge with that Amsterdam shit."

My Pepsi Challenge does not have the same blind element in that I already knew which streamer was which, and I already had a bias going in. However, it does involve comparing like things to see which is the best. Plus, there would be less inherent subjectivity to it. While it's a personal assessment what flavor of soda you like the best, the crispness of an image, in most cases, is not a matter of preference. 

So first I checked to see if Eat Pray Love was available on one of my other streamers. It was. Amazon.

Then I decided to watch the first few minutes of the movie, just to get an idea of how much better I thought it looked. 

Then I decided I would actually take a picture of the same scene from both movies, one on Amazon and one on Stan, to make a side-by-side comparison all the easier. 

There was no comparison.

Before I show you the pictures, I'll tell you I selected this particular scene because it was a party Julia Roberts' character attends early on -- in theory, where she starts to get the idea she's not happy. An indoor scene, making the lighting all the more important to get right. This was the where I noticed how dark the movie looked. I particularly wanted a shot featuring Viola Davis, because her complexion makes the phenomenon all the more pronounced, as when the image is as dark as I perceived it to be during my viewing, you basically lose the ability to distinguish the features on her face. 

So I paused the movie at the 4:26 mark on Amazon and here's what I got:

I believed this was much brighter than my experience had been with Eat Pray Love. You can see the details of Davis' face just fine. However, I need to go back into Stan to be sure.

Oh no.

Never mind that I didn't get the depth of the shot just right. By comparison, the image on Stan is, frankly, awful looking. The right side of Davis' face is completely indiscernible. I've heard that due to their complexions, it is especially important to light Black actors correctly, otherwise this is what happens. 

On a lark, I decided to see if Eat Pray Love was also available on Netflix. It was.

If we were looking for infinitesimal differences between two like products, as Pepsi was in its comparisons with Coke, the only contest here would be between Amazon and Netflix. These two images look slightly different, but the preference on which one is better could reasonably be in the eye of the beholder.

Whereas Stan would finish a distant, distant third -- or perhaps fourth, behind the option of not watching the movie at all.

There is one other thing I haven't even told you about this. When I started watching Eat Pray Love the other night, I did try to fix the image within the movie, after I'd been watching it for maybe 20 minutes. I determined that Stan allows you to adjust the video quality between the settings of Low, Medium, High and Auto, to optimize your experience based on the speed of your internet. Ours was set to Auto by default, so I changed it to High. I noticed a slight uptick in the quality, but not to Netflix or Amazon levels.

Perversely, I also watched a few seconds of this movie in both Low and Medium. Lordy.

I am now asking myself:

Can I even watch movies on Stan anymore? Should we even still be subscribing to it?

There is no doubt that I like having this extra streamer available as an option for when I'm looking for a movie I can't otherwise find, and that Stan has come through for me in the past. Just earlier this week, I learned that my #1 of 2024, The Substance, will begin streaming on Stan starting ... well, starting today in fact. I thought this was my occasion to finally show the movie to my wife.

But can I even do that if it's going to look like this?

Here's the biggest problem: As a critic, I rely on having no details that are beyond the control of the filmmakers impacting my ability to assess the film. You can already see how this has failed me with regards to Eat Pray Love. In my post Thursday, I mentioned the lighting problems multiple times. Fortunately, I did also mention my suspicion that Stan could be part of the problem, as I already had reason to suspect this. More on that in a minute.

As it turns out, those lighting problems had nothing to do with how Ryan Murphy shot the movie. They only had to do with how Stan projected it. 

Stan does not show a huge number of original films, though I did use it last year to watch and rank the Nicolas Cage film Arcadian, which I did not happen to review. But let's say I had reviewed Arcadian. I might have spent some valuable real estate in the review dinging the movie for a thing that was not its fault. I don't think Arcadian would have been a good movie no matter where it was projected, but being projected on Stan certainly did it no favors. 

Similarly, I don't think I would have liked Eat Pray Love much better no matter where I'd seen it. But I can't be sure. With movies, a first impression often sticks with you. And my first impression of Eat Pray Love was of a dark movie that looked bad. 

This is a worry that has come up for me before related to sound. I remember specifically discussing it (on this blog, I think) in relation to Clint Eastwood's Gran Turino, which had an unfortunate mix between its music and its dialogue such that you had to turn up the volume to hear the dialogue and then rush to turn it down again any time the music came on. At the time, I wondered if there was any way to know whether this was the movie's fault or if it had something to do with my TV or other aspect of my individual viewing experience. Fortunately, another person independently confirmed they'd had the same experience with this movie.

But as a critic, I don't want to be constantly confirming my impressions of movies with other people. I want to know I've got a high-quality streamer presenting it, like Netflix or Amazon. 

But I also don't like to give up on products that I have subscribed to and in many ways like. I am actually involved in a similar problem with my tennis club right now, poor service and considering not renewing my membership, but vastly preferring the option to renew. 

So I decided to dig deeper on this. 

I looked back into our viewing history on Stan. At first I actually did this to see how much we were really using the service, but then that morphed into something else.

And this discovered for me that in the past year, I have watched exactly seven other movies on Stan: Throw Momma from the Train a few weeks ago, the aforementioned Arcadian, three Halloween movies when I was watching those during October, a revisit of The Crow in preparation for watching the new version, and a random revisit of The Truman Show. 

Seven movies in a year is not a lot for paying a monthly subscription fee. Of course, I am not the only one who uses Stan. My younger son randomly binged the entire Henry Danger series last year, most of which he had already seen, and my wife has watched a half-dozen series in that year, most notably Hacks. There's value in that. 

But there may not be continuing value for me. Even when I watched The Crow, I remember thinking it did not look very good, though I think I put that on my memory of the movie. The weird skipping forward and doubling back by a second or two, which happened a number of times throughout the movie? Well of course that was on Stan. 

I thought I might do the Pepsi Challenge on The Truman Show, but of course, this one was not available on either Amazon or Netflix. Thereby clarifying the conundrum I am in about the service Stan provides me.

But I did decide to click into it to see if the "Stan effect" was visible here. Indeed, it did not look great, though obviously I had not noticed it at the time I watched it last year. That assessment could have been complicated by the fact that I was watching it on my projector, so it was reasonable to imagine there would be differences in the projection. 

The experience of watching movies has to do in large measure with the quality of how they look. That may be an obvious statement, but I'm making it anyway. A good script can drag a movie past its visual components, but it needn't. Movies are first and foremost a visual medium.

So, in light of the definite value I get from a movie like The Truman Show -- not to mention the three Halloween movies that were not available to me any other way, and now The Substance -- I took this whole thing one step further and contacted Stan customer support, including the three stills of Eat Pray Love you see above.

Their first response was to tell me my email address was not associated with a Stan account and to provide further information to prove I was a customer. I was a little annoyed by this, but I get it. They don't want to invest time in a customer unless they know it's really a customer. I intentionally did not provide the additional information about myself because it would still not match up to anything in their system, only telling them the account was associated with my wife's email address, and providing them that address. I did this in part to see if they would come back to me again to prove I was associated with the account holder, as at this point, Stan's customer service, or lack thereof, might be a factor in whether we keep it or not.

They then sent another response asking me to cc in my wife, so yeah, I guess that was sort of the thing I didn't want them to do. But I guess I have to admit I still get it, and sure, this approach is more secure for us. When I responded and cc'd her in, they then responded again (different person this time) confirming what the first person said about needing to verify. Getting more annoyed. Also, when that second person replied, they forgot to cc my wife so I had to reply again, ccing her again. The guy replied apologizing for not ccing her, but then also did not cc her on that response. I guess the net result is a state of annoyance remaining constant.

My wife replied and things were finally allowed to go forward.

Finally they said they could not duplicate this in their analytics and asked what our TV model number is. I replied. 

A third person (they work in shifts, and I do appreciate someone keeping the thread live while the others are off) got back to me and asked if the same issue were happening on any other devices.

Duh. I'm an IT guy and I didn't even think to check this. 

So then I did watch a little bit of Eat Pray Love on Stan on my laptop, and this time, it looked fine. I mean, it looked equivalent to how the other services looked. The way Ryan Murphy filmed it. Which also explains why my wife, who tends to watch Stan through her devices, does not notice the things I've noticed. 

Okay, so this is some sort of interaction effect between Stan and my TV. Maybe we can blame the intermediary, which would be Fetch, the conduit through which we access a lot of other TV-related things on our HDMI2 port. I suppose it's like an AppleTV. 

We actually do also have AppleTV, but unfortunately, it's through my U.S. iTunes (which I need to keep in order to access movies that have not been released here yet) and therefore I can't get the Stan app in the app store.

Well at least now I know what I'm working with. And I know that Stan is not just some purveyor of shoddy streams. 

Stan support responded again (they're right on it, really) asking me to go to a URL on my TV to run a speed test. I tried and tried but I can't figure out how to type in a URL on my TV. So I did the native speed test on Fetch, which came back fine. I told them this.

And then a lightbulb went off, and I finally started to really think like an IT guy -- on my own this time, without the prompting of anyone else.

I thought, if Fetch is the problem, I'll see this problem also when I go on Netflix through Fetch, rather than through the native Netflix app on my TV. I can't get Stan through AppleTV, which I had hoped to do to put it on a level playing field with Amazon Prime. But I can go the other way around, signing into Netflix on Fetch. 

And you know what? Eat Pray Love looked like shit on Netflix through the Fetch box, too. 

So now, ultimately, Stan is completely exonerated in this. Fetch is the shoddy service, or maybe it's just something about the settings. I've already gone through and tried to tweak a lot of settings that I think could relate, to no avail. But at least now I know for sure where the problem lies.

The scientific method involves changing only one variable at a time, but also, knowing all the variables you can and should change to get your answers. I do this without even thinking about it in IT, and now I've finally done it at home too.

The Pepsi Challenge is a useful starting point, but you have to know what it is that you're actually comparing. I thought I was comparing streamers, when I was actually comparing ... digital media players, is I guess the right way to refer to AppleTV and Fetch, as I just discovered from the internet. 

You may be able to tell this post was written partially in real time, as I got the first part of it out without knowing what the problem was, before coming around to the right answer in the end. If I'd done all of this before I started writing, I surely would have structured this post differently. But I can't be bothered to toss all the writing I've already done and start anew. 

However, I think there's something useful about having gone through this the way I did, in terms of where I ended up. Maybe if I hadn't been writing about it, and feeling like I demanded a definitive answer for you, my reader, I wouldn't have gone the extra steps that helped me put my finger on the true problem here. 

And Stan -- poor, innocent Stan -- might have gone bye bye.

Now, if I can just figure out how to get a good Stan stream through Fetch in order to watch The Substance ... 

Reasons not to take Netflix for granted

I’m not talking about Netflix the streaming giant, the original studio, the industry disruptor, the

content fire hose, the Spielberg annoyer, the millennial way of life or, way back when, the DVD-through-the-mail service.

No, today I want to talk to you about Netflix, the technological platform.

It would be easy to forget just how dang well this thing works … unless you have something subpar to compare it to.

We don’t subscribe to any of Netflix’s US competitors, in part because they weren’t available when we first got to Australia, and in part because Netflix is enough for us. I know we miss out on original content on Amazon, Hulu, all that, but there’s so much original content in general that it hardly seems worth crying over missing any particular subsection of it.

We do, however, subscribe to Stan, an Australian streaming service that has worked out a number of great content deals. Stan is carrying Disney/Marvel/Star Wars in Australia, as well as, I believe, every single Bond movie. (No time like the present to pick up where I left off six years ago, when my chronological viewing of the Connery movies stopped at Goldfinger.) Stan also gives us access to random American peak TV shows that we love, like Better Call Saul.

But as a streaming technology, Stan sucks.

At first we thought the poor resolution and the buffering were a function of our internet, and in truth, that’s somewhat to blame. Despite living just outside the city in North Melbourne, an eminently cosmopolitan area, we do not yet have the Nationwide Broadband Network, known to everyone as the NBN. Areas farther away and even some areas in the boonies have it, but we don’t yet. When this does one day happen, it should help improve our shit internet.

But that same internet does not contain a single performance issue when watching something on Netflix. Not a blip. Not a drop. Not a single delay.

It got so bad this past week that I had to stop my rewatch of Exit Through the Gift Shop on Wednesday night because it wouldn’t play more than five seconds without pausing for more than five seconds. In fact, the only way to finish it was to shift the viewing to my phone, which uses the same internet, but is apparently more sophisticated than my TV set up in terms of delivering the actual content. It was still bad, but it was enough improved that it was reasonable to persevere, and the remaining 40 minutes of the movie probably took only about 45 minutes to watch. As opposed to, I don’t know, a million.

I’d hoped that was just a single bad evening, but then my wife’s and my joint viewing of Book Week on Saturday night was similarly disrupted. In this case we were able to get better results by restarting our Fetch box, the device through which we stream Stan.

But even at its best, when it does not buffer, Stan delivers a sub-optimal viewing experience, looking grainy and a bit unfocused. Taking advantage of the Disney/Marvel deal, I watched both Iron Man 3 and Inside Out through Stan within the past few months, and neither popped the way it should have. Tellingly, during that time I also rewatched Avengers: Infinity War, but I watched it on a DVD borrowed from the library even though it was available through Stan. It looked a million times better.

If you’re opting to borrow something from the library because you know the version you have available at a touch of your fingertips is not going to be good enough, it kind of defeats the whole purpose.

And yet we don’t really want to unsubscribe from Stan because of the access to Better Call Saul and the like. Plus our kids have just discovered some shows on there they really like. Strangely, these shows do not have an issue streaming for them, but that could be because they watch them in the morning. So maybe competing during the peak nighttime viewing hours with other subscribers is also factoring in. Which it really should not.

All this is not to go on at length about Stan and its deficiencies. Stan will improve over time, I’m sure, to the extent that its budget and the talent it hires will allow it.

Instead, it’s just to be reminded that when you are paying that very small amount per month for that very large amount of content, Netflix is also giving you a viewing experience that is as good as DVD.

And when you’ve seen the alternative, it’s something to appreciate indeed.