Sunday, August 13, 2017

Post-Mortem: Seeso

See Ya
 Seeso is shutting down any day now, but when it shuts down is irrelevant, because I have slightly less than a month to watch what I wanna watch, because of course the monthly charge came through like two fucking days after they announced the channel was ending.


Seeso, start to finish, was good ideas and good intentions with shitty execution. They pumped money into projects by up and coming comedians, from stand up specials to original series. They amassed an excellent collection of semi-obscure comedies, from Brit stuff like Garth Merenghi and Alan Partridge to Canadian stand-up compilation Funny as Hell, which featured tons of sets from people who are very famous now.

Having the SNL catalogue was occasionally nice, though more in principle than execution. I don't give two shits about NBC late night, so Meyers and Fallon's shit didn't interest me, but it was easy enough to include.

And then, there was the experience of actually using it. It took them forever to get an Apple TV app. Most of the time I watched it on the FireTV, and if Netflix is like an 8 in terms of being able to find things and having them actually play, Seeso's apps hovered between a 2 and a 4. They never got their organization and classification straight.

And, if the app stayed resident in device memory for a certain amount of time, somewhere between a couple hours and overnight, streaming stopped working until you killed and restarted the app. And even then, shit is dicey. I spent fifteen minutes today trying to watch Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ Season 3, Episode 5, the one with Howard Kremer in it, and it just refused to play. This is not the first time this has happened.

So, sad to see you go, Seeso, and also, good fucking riddance. I've been forced to switch to VRV, which at least is in the midst of switching to a business model that makes some goddamned sense and isn't an incomprehensible a la carte nightmare. They picked up Hidden America and Harmonquest, both of which have a second season I want to see, My Brother My Brother And Me, which I've been told I should be interested in, and Cyanide and Happiness, which was one of the first things available on Seeso and which I've never watched. VRV also doesn't have an Apple TV app, so I'm back into that fresh hell. Except they also don't have a FireTV app. Assholes. On the other hand, they have Bravest Warriors and Bee and Puppycat, which I wasn't gonna shell out for by themselves.

Still in limbo, Bajillion (including an unaired Season 4), Take My Wife, which I'm hoping to watch in my last month, and Shrink, which I doubt there's any way I'm gonna get to. I hope they find a home, and that someone picks up the slack and starts funding more of these types of projects.

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