Danny B

I just watched the 1st three episodes of 'Servant' on Apple+

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8068860/

Weird as hell, but what do you expect coming from M.Knight Shyamalan.

Atlantic Xpat

The first season take a little getting into - there are two distinct storylines that take some time to intertwine but it does a phenomenal job of world building and is good "hard" SciFi e.g. there's no magic FTL drive, antigravity etc, plus space combat is rather more realistic than you say on most SciFi properties. My SciFi bonafides? Well, my previous best series in this genre was Babylon 5. And if that isn't good enough for you then I'm done talking! :-)

Steerpike

Finally wrapped up 'The Crown' season 3 last week; lovely production values, great cast, but ... it didn't have anywhere near the same impact as the earlier seasons. Helena Bonham-Carter was a delight to watch, though! I'm not a 'Royal watcher' by any means, but I just can't imagine people in the royal family disclosing anything about the various private conversations that went on around all the various incidents - like Camilla - so the show is a bit overstocked with tabloid speculation. I have to say, the lady they got to play Princess Anne was a dead-ringer for her! The episode about Prince Phillip, with his interactions with the vicars, was especially dull ... despite inter-twining the story with the Apollo mission. Did Mountbatten really get that close to participating in a coup? Was Wilson really that wimpy? Didn't know about his Alzheimer's, I must say.

The show serves to remind me just how useless most of the royal family is. I can accept the Queen herself as a tourist attraction, but the rest of them ... complete waste of money!

BristolUK

Up to episode 7 of Condor now. Way better than the Treadstone series.

For those that like Homeland/CIA type stuff it's very good.

sharkus

Started watching "Barry" on HBO, slightly dark, but very very funny.

Steerpike

Where do you find this?! I went into my Netflix and Amazon accounts, no luck. I then did a general search, and it is associated with something called "AT&T Audience Network" ... wft is that?! Free with your ATT phone service ... ?

I know you get your stuff through 'creative means' but I'm not interested in going down that path ...

ETA just saw this "Exclusive network for AT&T U-verse and DIRECTV". So DirecTV or u-verse ... yuk.

BristolUK

It's on my list following a recommendation fro someone who liked Patriot.

Sounds like it.
Surely 'creative means' would be something like paying for a VPN service that falsely creates the impression one is, for example, in the UK to enable access to BBC's iPlayer which the BBC would otherwise not allow.

In my case, for Condor, all I do is click on the url in my bookmarks (I bookmark the url of the show or movie to come back to) and click play. It couldn't be simpler.

Steerpike

I just clicked the link to 'condor' you provided. I then clicked on 'episode 10' as a test. I got four screens popping up at me before I could blink ...








I have some pretty decent ad blockers and anti-malware tools in place, but there's no way I'm going to click through any of these items and risk getting bad stuff on my computer. I spend a lot of time cleaning up other people's computers after they get malware installed having tried to watch 'free' videos ... it's just not worth it. If I were going to go down this path I'd build a raspberry pi and put Kodi on it, or something like that.

BristolUK

I have never got anything like that. I have adblock plus and ublock origin on firefox. The episode comes up, I click play, expand and watch.
I click next episode if I'm watching more than one episode at a time, click play, expand and watch. No form of advertising whatsoever, links or any other diversions, just in and play.

What I get




And even though there's a sign up option, I never do it.

Steerpike

FWIW - the 'bad stuff' popped up after clicking on the link 'Condor - Season 1 Episode 10 - Mistrust Blossoms' shown above in your screenshot.

I have a 'sandbox' environment (Sanboxie), and I'm willing to run anything in that. I got no 'nasty popups' in that environment ... but also, the video never started ... I just got a spinning circle. I then tried another source near the bottom, and that did start playing. So it seems, with the proper safety measures, one can view these links but I caution the average user.

BristolUK

This has been my go-to site for - I don't know how long. There were previous versions of watchseries - similar appearance to each other but completely different appearance to this one. They would occasionally throw up the "congratulations" message but a close and re-click was all that was needed.

The various versions of Primewire sometimes a game comes up but again, close it and just click again.

I'm certainly no more than the average user - tech wise - perhaps I just got used to certain behaviours of streaming sites way back.

When something doesn't want to play, or plays and keeps buffering - maybe once a month - I may use my other laptop that has Internet Download Manager on it and it will save it to watch at leisure. How it downloads a movie in a minute or so from something that might have buffering issues (a much bigger problem years ago) seems pure magic to me.

But, equally, 24 hours later and it may play fine anyway.

BuckinghamshireBoy

+1 for "but I caution the average user."

I just followed the link mentioned, got a "play video" thing to click on, then all hell seemed to break loose in terms of "xyz wants to show notifications, please allow" err, no thanks, repeated over and over and over, different 'site' same domain each time. I got bored and canned it.

BristolUK

You're making me feel speshul

I currently have nine shows from that site all bookmarked for future watching having watched at least another dozen shows on it with no issues whatsoever.

Steerpike

I suspect you are underselling yourself here. You are probably VERY experienced when it comes to how these sites operate. It may be like riding a bike or driving a car - you don't have to understand 'how' it works, you just have to know 'what to do'.

With the right combination of blockers - ad blockers, virus blockers, popup blockers, etc - I'm sure you can navigate your way through all this but it does take a certain level of experience. One careless click and you can be in a word of hurt.

ETA - having said that, it does seem that Kodi on a raspberry Pi device would be the ideal solution ... I keep meaning to embark on that project!

BristolUK

Oh sure. I just meant that I'm not techie at all. You only have to see my questions on the Lab forum to get that.

As I say, just adblock plus and ublock origin. But now you mention it, maybe W10 makes quite a difference too. Pre-W10 I was using avast or zone alarm and it was a lot trickier to deal with the behaviours. Now there really don't seem to be any.
I tried kodi - posted on it somewhere. Didn't like it.