Sunday, June 16, 2019

Streaming Power Rankings #165: Special Father's Day edition

Happy Father's Day, everyone! Since I happen to be a dad myself, and not just the father of this blog, I am going to be indulgent this week and throw out much of my normal scientific, reasoned approach and rely on impulse a bit more for these rankings. Next week we will get back to the analytics-driven approach to which you are accustomed.

1) YouTube: June's YouTuber of the month should not be someone who posts videos of herself playing video games, nor kids opening toys, nor someone showing off a shopping "haul." The honor goes to the good citizen who is uploading

2) Amazon Prime Video: I have been making an effort to utilize Prime Video more lately, including seeing originals like Bosch and Good Omens plus oldies like Yancy Derringer and The Joey Bishop Show. I don't see great reviews for Too Old to Die Young, but it's an intriguing original, though I was dismayed to learn it starred Miles Teller.

3) Netflix: Jessica Jones is back, and there are a lot of new originals that don't interest me, but I enjoyed--wait, I didn't actually see a lot on here this week. My kids and I did, though! Goosebumps 2 is surprisingly entertaining.

4) Hulu: It made a big deal with Lionsgate to get exclusive post-theatrical windows for its feature films starting in 2020. It already got some of these rights thanks to a separate deal with Epix, but now Epix loses the rights. The thing nobody seems to be reporting is how this affects Amazon Prime, which got some of the same rights, I think, due to ITS deal with Epix.

I guess what I'm saying is this is a win for Hulu and maybe even hurts a potential competitor or two.

5) Boomerang: Remember last week when I said I canceled my subscription? Well, I am on borrowed time, I guess, but still have access to it. So I watched some goofy stuff this week like Richie Rich cartoons. I complained about the 4/99/month rate, but my current price is outstanding.

6) Shout! Factory TV: I want to give a nod to Shout! for finally figuring out how to get its Roku channel back up and running. Yes, a lot of the material is available elsewhere (and w/o ad breaks if you find it on Amazon), but this is still a tremendous collection of free content.

7) Martin Kane, Private Eye: Yes, an entire Roku channel devoted to presenting as many episodes of the 1950s TV show as possible. There will be dozens of new Roku channels added in June that are more glamorous, but not many that I will watch as much.

8) DAZN/ESPN+:  Because I forgot to rank it last week, when it had tons of buzz after airing the stunning Ruiz-Wilder boxing upset, and this week, ESPN+ had the Tyson Fury fight.

9) Cinemax: They say no publicity is bad publicity. At the beginning of the week, chatter had it that Cinemax would be basically a throw-in in the upcoming Warner Media streamer. I thought that was bad publicity because it proved how inessential the channel was. Yet now Cinemax has a new Carla Gugino series (Jett) which, if I squint hard enough, almost sorta sounds like Karen Sisco. I'm gonna have to squint really hard to see it since I don;t see myself having Cinemax anytime in the near future, but, hey, I am thinking about Cinemax.

10) Showtime: Similarly, the acclaim for the series finale of Billions and the premiere of City on a Hill has me actually thinking about Showtime for a change.

1 comment:

Beelink said...

Media streamer device is a good choice for family entertainment. If you have a TV box that allows your TV to watch online video directly, aren't you excited? Not only that, but also can be used to play HD games, very cool.