🔵 TV Series- Consolidate to single title

[Transepoch]

It just doesn't fit the brand image the company is trying to create. They should abandon it like they did music playback if they can't make it world class.

I have to vehemently disagree with that sentiment. Better to have some implementation rather than none.

 

[alexbeans]

I have to vehemently disagree with that sentiment. Better to have some implementation rather than none.

I concur. No need for K to be best in the class. But at least try to make improvements in the UI. Plex, Infuse and even the defunct Zappiti make their UI pleasant to look at and navigate. I use all 3. Four if including K.
I love the moving artwork from Zappiti and the organizational structure of Plex and Infuse. Also Plex and Zappiti makes it easy to modify the cover art. K and Infuse do too but very troublesome.
K’s UI was groundbreaking over a decade ago but others have emulated and improve on it.
K do not have to be the best in the class but at least be in par with the others. Considering that they are located in Silicon Valley, there should be tons of software engineers that can upgrade their software. If money is the issue, Infuse charges 99 cents a month as a subscription service for their app. I know that many of us don’t want to pay more, but I think we wouldn’t mind paying $1 a month for software improvements. Or even a few dollars a month given that K probably have a smaller community.

 

[Kaycee2000]

I concur. No need for K to be best in the class. But at least try to make improvements in the UI. Plex, Infuse and even the defunct Zappiti make their UI pleasant to look at and navigate. I use all 3. Four if including K.
I love the moving artwork from Zappiti and the organizational structure of Plex and Infuse. Also Plex and Zappiti makes it easy to modify the cover art. K and Infuse do too but very troublesome.
K’s UI was groundbreaking over a decade ago but others have emulated and improve on it.
K do not have to be the best in the class but at least be in par with the others. Considering that they are located in Silicon Valley, there should be tons of software engineers that can upgrade their software. If money is the issue, Infuse charges 99 cents a month as a subscription service for their app. I know that many of us don’t want to pay more, but I think we wouldn’t mind paying $1 a month for software improvements. Or even a few dollars a month given that K probably have a smaller community.

100% agree. I was honestly floored to see so many features that I was used to from Zappiti either not here in the Kscape UI or just a very sad rendition. At this price point it's really bad form. The baseline code is either antiquated, poorly written for scaling, or they are just lazy about it. I'm also surprised that more negative opinions about it ate talked about on YouTube video reviews. The only person I really see making a point about it is Jeremy at Techthusiasm. We all really need to light a fire under Kscape about it.

 

[alexbeans]

I concur. No need for K to be best in the class. But at least try to make improvements in the UI. Plex, Infuse and even the defunct Zappiti make their UI pleasant to look at and navigate. I use all 3. Four if including K.
I love the moving artwork from Zappiti and the organizational structure of Plex and Infuse. Also Plex and Zappiti makes it easy to modify the cover art. K and Infuse do too but very troublesome.
K’s UI was groundbreaking over a decade ago but others have emulated and improve on it.
K do not have to be the best in the class but at least be in par with the others. Considering that they are located in Silicon Valley, there should be tons of software engineers that can upgrade their software. If money is the issue, Infuse charges 99 cents a month as a subscription service for their app. I know that many of us don’t want to pay more, but I think we wouldn’t mind paying $1 a month for software improvements. Or even a few dollars a month given that K probably have a smaller community.

Also to add, maybe K will benefit by being a software company and offer their product as a SaaS. Their hardware is fine the way it is and very little improvement is needed except for economy of scale to reduce the cost. But they are currently relying too much on hardware sale that’s outside the reach of many to purchase. The player and initial storage is ok. $10k to get into K is a fair price but needing to pay for Terra storage when your drive is filled up is crazy.
I don’t know if it is possible, but I would be happy to pay a monthly licensing fee to have the ability to swap out the hard drives by buying an OEM hard drive for a few hundred dollars as opposed to thousands. At least by having monthly subscribers, it will be easy to predict the company’s cash flow instead of relying on hardware and movie sales to stay afloat.

 

[Kaycee2000]

Also to add, maybe K will benefit by being a software company and offer their product as a SaaS. Their hardware is fine the way it is and very little improvement is needed except for economy of scale to reduce the cost. But they are currently relying too much on hardware sale that’s outside the reach of many to purchase. The player and initial storage is ok. $10k to get into K is a fair price but needing to pay for Terra storage when your drive is filled up is crazy.
I don’t know if it is possible, but I would be happy to pay a monthly licensing fee to have the ability to swap out the hard drives by buying an OEM hard drive for a few hundred dollars as opposed to thousands. At least by having monthly subscribers, it will be easy to predict the company’s cash flow instead of relying on hardware and movie sales to stay afloat.

I like the SAAS idea, but I disagree with the very little updates needed. they have alot of features that are either out of date compared to other products or just nonexistent

 

[dla26]

I'm ok with SAAS for new users who roll their own servers as it might give a good way to onboard people and make it more mass market, but I'd be a bit pissed if my purchase of a $20,000 server didn't include lifetime updates.

 

[cinelife]

@alexbeans, We've had easy access to content for so long that folks forget that there are contract requirements in place that K must adhere to in order to legally create a persistent copy on a storage device. As I remember it, one of the most important selling points to the studios in working to gain access to their content, especially 4K (UHD/HDR), is that all downloads would be to highly secure proprietary products, basically closed systems that would insure the content would be protected. These security measures are the reason we are required to use their components, their drives, their software, and agree to the conditions stated in the SLA. Unless the content owners wake up one day and decide they no longer care about protecting their content, I don't see the current requirements changing.

Jim

 

[alexbeans]

@alexbeans, We've had easy access to content for so long that folks forget that there are contract requirements in place that K must adhere to in order to legally create a persistent copy on a storage device. As I remember it, one of the most important selling points to the studios in working to gain access to their content, especially 4K (UHD/HDR), is that all downloads would be to highly secure proprietary products, basically closed systems that would insure the content would be protected. These security measures are the reason we are required to use their components, their drives, their software, and agree to the conditions stated in the SLA. Unless the content owners wake up one day and decide they no longer care about protecting their content, I don't see the current requirements changing.

Jim

I was thinking more in line with buying a Terra Server with empty drives and adding our own drives but still keeping it as a closed system. But to be honest, if K can just come up with a way for me to view the list of all my movies (downloaded and non downloaded) on the K player, I’m good with keeping all my digital movies on the cloud. It’s just that my 40TB server is full and I have close to 300 movies non downloaded so I don’t even know what movies I own when I’m trying to figure out what to watch. I’ve already put in $20k for my hardware which I’m fine with. But certainly do not want to fork out another $20k to store my non downloaded movies.

 

[cinelife]

Understood, unfortunately the drives are part of the total security built into the system (that's what I've always been told).

I understand the desire to have access to all the content you own available for playback. I suspect most of us own content that's not on our servers because of storage limitations, but these are known limitations when we buy into these products. Like everyone else, I'd love to see lower pricing on additional storage.

Jim

 

[superpoppa]

Is it possible to keep just a single episode on your system instead of the entire season?

 

[JohnJ]

TV series are split like the discs with maybe 2-3 episodes downloaded as a file. You could keep the first file of episodes of season 1 as a reminder that you own. You can try downloading and see where the splits are.

John

 

[josh]

Is it possible to keep just a single episode on your system instead of the entire season?

Interesting question. I don't believe so, but will see if @MikeKobb knows the answer.

 

[superpoppa]

TV series are split like the discs with maybe 2-3 episodes downloaded as a file. You could keep the first file of episodes of season 1 as a reminder that you own. You can try downloading and see where the splits are.

John

I didn’t see an option to delete individual “disc” that contained roughly 3 episodes as part of the split up download. When I hit delete the entire season deletes.

 

[JohnJ]

As you start the download, you need to delete all files for season 1 except the first file. This gets you the minimum space downloaded And allows you to know you own this series. It is what I do.

John

 

[superpoppa]

As you start the download, you need to delete all files for season 1 except the first file. This gets you the minimum space downloaded And allows you to know you own this series. It is what I do.

John

Interesting. So how does that show on your K ui? It shows the whole season but errors out if you play it? Or if you try to play an episode that would have been in subsequent downloads?

What I’m looking for is more around wanting to keep only a single episode, ie: episode 6 out of a total of 10 in that season for example.

 

[thrillcat]

I'd really love to see an update to how K handles TV seasons, from how it displays in the collection to how it manages the files. Would love to see options to download individually by episode, automatically delete after watching, and indicate how many episodes to keep on your system at one time.

Until we can get options like this, I'll probably stick to using iTunes for TV purchases, except the rare show with excellent production such as Game of Thrones and Last of Us, which I've bought on K. We only have OTA, AppleTV+ and a couple services we get for free bundled into other expenses, like MAX and Prime. We'll turn on Netflix again for a month to watch the last season of Stranger Things if it ever drops, but we don't watch a ton of TV in general.

 

[superpoppa]

GoT happens to be the example in my case. Keeping an entire season of 4K HDR files on my K is a lot. But wanted to keep a couple reference episodes I like to revisit.

 

[MikeKobb]

At the present time, for content like TV seasons that spans multiple downloaded files, there's no way to delete an individual file once it's downloaded. Let's say that you watch a whole TV season and you don't want to keep it around, but one episode is extra-special and so you really want to keep that one. You could delete the whole season, then schedule it for download again but cancel all the files except the one that has your episode on it. That won't get you down to one episode, but it would reduce the size. If you go to your download history in the browser interface, you can typically see how many individual files there are for a season, and they're normally named so that you can identify which episodes are on each. See example below: