I remember as a kid, mostly having access to HBO/Showtime etc during their "free" week/month that came along about once a year or so. I think my dad subbed for a couple months once, but that was it. Otherwise it was just basic cable and nothing else.
Even then, 90% of the time was watching local/broadcast networks via cable.
Wouldn't necessarily bet on it... would likely need to use puppeteer or playwright and change the user agent to match the desktop browser. And even then, the various services likely change pretty regularly.
That said... could maybe setup a mitm service that does this for even $5/yr to manage various services... where that service takes care of updating their signon/cancel scripts. Maybe even a semi-trusted mechanical turk as necessary.
Also I have to assume that some of those services have some sort of catchall where they stop letting you resubscribe after the fifth or sixth time you cancel in a year.
I started just ripping everything when the studios started adding unskippable ads... I had a rental copy of Friday, still have never actually seen it, there was a bad scratch and it froze after 30+ minutes of unskippable previews.
I've never had a really bad player though... I have seen players that had issues with burned disks, but not mfg (unless scratched rentals).
Hoopla is good for this is what I hear as well. I have not tried it yet, I have not taken the time to get my library card since I moved and forgot to renew. There's a new library opening up near me, so waiting on that to open a new card.
Big ups on that! Not to mention your local library's collection of DVDs. Or, their inter-library loan system for the ultra weird and rare.
One note on Kanopy - they use a ticket system (10-15 tickets per library customer). So if you have a couple people in your household, all of your library card numbers contribute tickets to the login. And, if you have two library systems like we do here (KCLS and SPL) you can double dip on all the cards again. No hack required - Kanopy actually has a very nice way of failing over to other cards as your quota is used up.
And if that's not enough, try Scarecrow Video out of Seattle. They are the masters of physical digital film media right now. It's fun to try to stump them. And they provide mailorder system similar to the old red envelopes of NetFlix.
eBay has DVD collections go up for sale all the time. Fun to buy the "box of movies" for $100 and see what you get.
Another big haul for me is from local thrift stores - usually 50 cents to 2 bucks a disc.
I would probably go Blu-Ray at least to have higher resolution content... Ripping isn't too bad (I use make-mkv then re-encode with handbrake). I don't really notice going up from 1080p, but really notice going below 1080p content. I also don't mind h.265's blurry handling of degradation over the blocky/chunky h.264... I haven't really observed enough lower bitrate AV1 to compare.
I have a Shield TV connected through my AVR and it works pretty well for content directly from my nas/cifs/smb via Kodi.
Not sure if this is legit... I could see it working well enough if they require the laptop to support at least say thunderbolt3/usb4 then they can use a single connection interface to a management/dock interface that includes a network connection (1gb/2.5gb)
The trouble is a lot of laptops won't power-on with the screen closed and have heavy sleep/suspend behaviors in general. Not to mention general airflow in whatever shelving system is used with the laptops, assuming 2-4 laptops per shelf, per 1u. Not to mention, one would probably want/need some means of ensuring appropriate driver support, or an appropriate Linux or other setup for said hardware.
While I can see it working, depending on shipping costs can definitely see some problematic bits.
Ironically, I've got most notifications disabled because I simply find them annoying. I think SMS, phone calls and my CGM are the only things that cause my phone to regularly make noise.
They could EASILY have had and still could have a companion service for free/hosted email/calendar/contacts. It could even have an open implementation for "open-source" private hosting. Could be a great alternative to the enshittified Outlook/M365 even. Could pretty readily undercut alternatives and still be profitable.
At least as a point of funding the open-source work.
The breaking changes, broken extensions and other bugs stopped me from using it altogether... I still have it on my phone (that version is based on K9 though), but long ago stopped using the shared dropbox profile. The profile rolled forward a version and I could no longer revert to an older version because of bugs in the app itself.
I used to love Thunderbird... I also used it a lot with BBS centric NNTP hosts... at some point those features largely broke as well, and extensions to correct the behavior fell farther and farther behind as well.
The lack of a good calendar/contacts server solution is also a massive pain point imo.
Phoenix, AZ had a local variety kids morning show, "Wallace and Ladmo" that anyone from the area born before 1985 or so probably remembers.
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