Some time last year I decided that as part of my escape from Internet isolation due to my own literal madness I would start trying out streaming services and stop relying on physical media to watch stuff and so I signed up for Netflix by prepay (yay, avoiding giving them my card details) and opened an eye-watering array of content which for a short while quite made me lose my mind until I understood the game of Netflix which is to repeatedly present the same fairly limited set of knock-off content but with different cover images to confuse the user. Don’t get me wrong, Netflix is still much better than not having Netflix, but there are moments. Oh there are moments. Due largely to The Boys, I shortly thereafter signed up for Amazon Prime, therefore forever wedding myself to servitude to Bezos. Prime feels like a better value proposition than Netflix, because you also get free next day shipping you can share with your significant other and a whole host of other services, each not quite as good as Prime Video but good enough and comparatively free thus dissuading you from signing up for competitors.

The other thing I prefer about Prime is that while its content is similarly limited to Netflix’s, it’s easy to add to it for a small amount of money, both in the form of add-on channels and just… “buying”(1) extra shows/films from Amazon.

I now think of these services as fairly indispensable because British Television is so unbearably universally bad and so I’m happy to keep the subs going for both. There is one aspect however where they are both eye-wateringly shit: Apparently neither Web 7.0 megacorp has worked out how to reliably shift a video file and its rights management information across the Internet. Streaming works, although sometimes is shifty due to our excellent mid 2000s broadband (really should sort that now we’re exiled to home working).

Now perhaps it’s that I use an iPad as the player (both natively and via an HDMI to lightning cable) and Apple are up to some sort of permissions bullshit wrt background downloads I’m not privy to, but I’m pretty sure the following problems are solved:

1. Downloading a file across the Internet
2. Supplying a Checksum so you know the file is not corrupt/truncated
3. Supplying functioning rights management information

Not so, it appears for either Amazon Prime Video or Netflix (or for that matter, Amazon’s music service or Kindle app which show similar behaviours).

Files get truncated and marked as complete. Files get stuck. The progress spinny thing gets stuck (restarting the app fixes it). Netflix have a bullshit limit on how many times or how long a video file may be downloaded for and guess what, partial downloads fuck with this. The only way to get either to reliably download is sit with the app open and wait for the file to download. On Amazon Prime Video you can see the file size - the number of 0Kb or 4Mbish video files - such compression – much wow! Of course if you try to play them you will see quite quickly by network activity that the app is smart enough to stream the missing parts, but not smart enough to have downloaded them in the first place. Deleting and redownloading the file may get you all of it or more or less than you got before. Files you download on either service may be unplayable with a mysterious error, but if you delete the download work fine streaming.

As a final insult from Bezos there’s a mysterious bug where trying to play an Amazon Prime video through HDMI just fails with an error – I found a work-around though – start playback and then plug it in and everything works. I presume this is some sort of HDMI rights issue, but it’s completely sporadic.

If you use the IpadOS settings app and look at Netflix’s storage you can see a catastrophe of randomly named files – sometimes they are named after the show, sometimes not – you will find things still stored that you deleted months ago that were never actually deleted. It’s worth doing a complete clearout every so often - you’ll be amazed how much space you reclaim.

Now you might leap to suggest that this is fact my mid-2000s broadband but it’s really not – I can quite happily shift Linux ISOs and other large files though a web browser, wget, git, whatever. My Internet is slow but it does in fact work, and Apple TV and the BBC Iplayer doesn’t have these problems either, but then there’s nothing worth watching on the latter.

This is a solved problem. It was solved in the 90s when downloading shit for free on Netscape over a modem. Why is it a problem now with services that we are paying for?

1) As much as you buy any digital content.