Shit like this is why I don't feel bad at all for pirating.
They raise their rates by 65% so they can continue to pay Hollywood actors to make crappy forgettable movies for the service
Don't forget the 5 BILLION dollars they just gave to WWE, a company that regularly goes to Saudi Arabia. A country so backwards in human rights that they don't allow women to work. So WWE's answer to this was to create a tornament just for the women. Called "The Great Moolah Classic". Only problem with that is, it happened just as the MeToo movement was happening. Now in case you're unaware, womens pro wrestling from the 1950s through the 1980s was dominated by "The Great Moolah".
Btw, I'M not saying she was great. Far from it. Thats just her stage name.
But if you were a woman, and you wanted to get into womens wrestling between 1950-1985 you NEEDED to go through The Great Moolah. Here's the problem though.
You had to live in a camp, where she controlled every aspect of your life from training through retirement. What she did with this control was appalling. She forced them to prostitute themselfs out to not only the male wrestlers, but also the rest of the general public in the area.
These women then had to give 100% of the money to Moolah, or else they'd be beaten.
And that's the tornament they tried to give as the consolation prize for women not being allowed to wrestle in Saudi Arabia. Oh, and when they were forced to change the name, almost IMMEDIATELY, they changed it to The Mae Young Classic. Mae Young was Moolah's best friend, and one of the people who would help beat the other women. That's still what it's called today. When they first introduced the trophy for it, the trophy was intentionally made to look like a vagina. "Here's your make believe trophy for winning a make believe tornament, as a consolation prize for very real restrictions on making very real money, and we shaped it like your genitals. Snickers, who sponsered the tornament balked when they saw their logo would be on that trophy, and they were forced to redesign it to something more generic. The tornament continues to this day.
And that's what Netflix just paid 5 BILLION dollars for. Either 3 or 5 years. I forget which.
Holy shit, do you have some more info or refs for this, this sounds unbelievably fucked up.
From the book The Chronicles of Mad Maxine and from Dark Side of the Ring S01E06.
Disclaimer: I only know what I just looked up. Not a big wrestling watcher personally.
From what I can tell there's two separate titles. The Mae Young Classic had two tournaments in 2017 & 2018. The Great Moolah was announced in 2018, subsequently changing the name to WrestleMania Women's Battle Royal. It also has only had two tournaments, in 2018 & 2019.
As for the logo/trophy, WrestleMania Women's Battle Royal looks like this, and the Mae Young Classic looks like this. I couldn't find any info on previous versions, but if there was one that looked more like a vagina, it might as well be an anatomical model.
Care to share what site you use to pirate? I haven't been in that loop for a while, but all these pricing increases for all these streaming services is driving me back.
Lemmy.World defederated from an instance known as the instance that has all the piracy. Then pushback from the userbase caused them to refederate. Then they defederated a SECOND time. Despite pushback from users AGAIN theystay defederated from them to this day.
So it wouldn't surprise me if they removed it.
Check out FMHY (Free Media Heck Yeah) they have a subreddit (I think) and a website. There's absolutely everything there for pirating.
rentry.co/megathread
links to pirate pretty much anything
123moviestv.net , bflixhd.to, yts.mx look for them through yandex search engine and not the google , google blocks them
Netflix has no way to continue growing aside from increasing prices. That is a bad sign. They will just keep squeezing people. Your best bet is to stop subscribing.
Damn near every tech company and major utility provider has no way of growing aside from squeezing.
No matter where you turn you will be getting squeezed, and it'll just get worse every year that regulations don't catch up.
And if the U.S. has it's way, institutional regulation will be a thing of the past as a new wave of unchecked corporate oligarchy begins. And since the U.S's biggest export is crazy, it'll just spread....
Making the future more grim.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Anyone care to actually do anything about it? Seems like people are more concerned about abortion and things like that than everyone's collective livelihood.
Trustbusting would be a solution, but people gotta get behind it. Guess which guy running for President is moving in that direction? Hint: it's not the billionaire.
The shareholders are seeking to juice the company and throw it away as usual. Users need to see the writing on the wall and move on.
Genius MBA thinking of our time
Yea tbh it's business model is gonna be obsolete.
The bottom line is especially in a trash economy where the rich are bleeding everyone, no one is gonna wanna pay for digital luxuries.
I only shell out for hardware and food.
Streaming is going to end up exactly like cable, it feels inevitable. Adverts, package bundle deals, contracts will be the final thing where they lock you in for a "discount".
Yup, I'm playing with Jellyfin for our devices. I already have a fair amount of content in a digital format, so I'm mostly testing to see if offline playback works well.
So far so good, just need my wife and kids to approve and I can kill Netflix.
Do the shareholders care?
Cause they just want to squeeze Netflix while they still can before they jump ship. And at that time, Netflix dying and another streaming services surfacing would be ideal for savvy investors.
Netflix removing subscribers. What is their plan, zero subscribers?
Is it opposite day?
They've tested the waters, and people will most probably wind up staying, as their password crackdown demonstrated.
Do you have any data that shows Netflix didn’t lose subscribers in markets where they cracked down on password sharing? I keep seeing people saying this is the case, but all the news stories I’ve read say that Netflix is only adding subscribers in the cheaper markets (like India and South America).
I don't have a source, but it wasn't that Netflix didn't lose subscribers, it was that their revenues grew. Part of that was charging subscribers more, but a lot of that was the new ad-supported plans netted them more money than basic ad-free plans. Which is probably why they're now sunsetting the basic ad-free plans.
Slightly off topic, but starting 2025 they're going to stop providing quarterly subscriber numbers to focus on "other metrics" related to revenue and growth.
This is public record due to their financial reporting obligations as public company, but their password sharing crackdown resulted in not insignificant amounts of new subscribers.
Or at least, there was meaningful growth that occurred in time periods that aligned with those policies going into effect.
Subscribers are subscribers are subscribers, the total is up so even if they lost some in the US/European market, the rest of the world makes up for it.
Emerging markets pay around $6 a month for Netflix. Basically the “password crackdown” markets are subsidizing the new subscriptions where Netflix is trying to gain a foothold. It’s the typical “get ‘em hooked, then start raising prices.”
Sure but if subscriptions were stagnating before and they're increasing more than ever, it ends up compensating for the loss of people who used to pay more.
Not only staying, they’ll stay and pay more
It's the classic "get people hooked with a free service then force them to pay"
Gotta bump up that "$/sub" metric!
Investors like a get rich or die trying mentality cause they don’t die, they leave.
remember when the adfree plan for netflix was 8.99?
Yup, and that's when I stopped buying DVDs and pirating. But with standard without ads being ~$15 with less selection, guess what I've gone back to doing?
They're passing off the price of inflation to the people
Hahahaha
My biggest beef is that the ad plans also limit your downloads. I use that feature a ton.
So now I just pirate everything.
We pay for an ad-free tier and our downloads "expired" when we were in the middle of nowhere. They still existed on our device and on the service, we just couldn't play them.
That got my wife annoyed enough that I think I can convince her to just buy DVDs again. $15/month is 1-2 DVDs/month, and that's about what we watch anyway. We won't get Netflix originals, but that's fine with me. If we ever need any of those, we can just binge for a month.
I joined the Plex server plan, it's better and works everywhere and I don't get price increases or ads
All the shows that I like I've been buying DVD or Blu-rays for, and then I rip them and put them on my Plex server. Just so I can watch some anytime, and not potentially damage the discs.
I don't have to worry about geofencing, Don't have to worry about a price change ever, Don't have to deal with commercials, Don't have to think if the shows that I like are going to disappear and maybe show up on a different provider, and generally higher quality audio and video.
Would it just be easier to use something like iTunes for movies/shows?
You'd have to remove the DRM protection to get the same results. But by that point it's no easier than ripping a blu ray, and with ripping you get the added benefit of having a physical copy.
Okay that makes sense. I have around 1,000 movies on iTunes so not sure if I’d have all the space for the dvds and would take a pretty long time to rip
Guess we are all lucky that we have options these days
I find putting a DVD into a DVD player without having to sign in, have credit, a credit card, and have wifi to be the easiest. Usually costs less too
I bet you still write checks also
Remember those few years when stores had a little machine they could feed the check into and it'd fill everything out for you?
And old people would still sit there and write it out
I'd say no. Because it's online and attached to your account it can be lost. If for some reason you lose access to your Apple account you lose everything you've bought. And a lot of these online services don't want you to share or transfer your account. So like if you pass away, most of these online services don't allow you to transfer the account to a living relative (per of the TOS) (granted I doubt there's much I could do to actually stop you if you just leave them out of it and just give the account to somebody).
Kids and spouse can still access everything since they are on my Apple family thing. I hear what you’re saying though.
Jellyfin + Wireguard VPN server says hello
Is it that the decade of 0% interest rates and angel funding for startups lulled us into unrealistically thinking we could get unlimited everything for 9.99 per month, or is it that companies are suddenly starting to rip off people?
As an end consumer it's impossible to gauge what is a proper price for entertainment.
Netflix has been profitable since 2003. This is greed.
It's probably the latter.
"Delivering shareholder value" has destroyed numerous companies, and I doubt it'll stop soon.
As with many things, it really is likely a mixture of both. Very possible that 9.99 was unrealistically low, but the current streaming market and "inflation" smoke screening is also enabling some real squeezing of consumers.
Not me! I gave all these streaming assholes the boot years ago.
It was maybe too low for their awesome library they had at the start (though their initial pricing was still more than a lot of their customers spent in a year for movies/TV prior).
It's criminally overpriced for their awful library now.
It's simple really
Is the boss a multimillionaire?
No: No problem
Yes: They're charging more than they need to
Also, on the "standard with ads" tier, they've removed the ability to chromecast.
Wow what a dumb way to basically gatekeep me from even moving to the ad tier.
The ads are added in the app. If you cast, the Chromecast can't add apps (yet) so they'd have to make ad streams instead, and switch between the streams show-ad-show which would take several seconds of loading screen each way and so on. Which is a level of fuckery even they shied away from.
TLDR they can't (easily) show ads during casting.
Kind of makes sense - casting is usually a webstream without extra dev effort. I'm not sure if you still can, but I used to circumvent twitch ads by casting from my phone. Not to excuse their shitty behaviour; I gave up on them years ago and started hosting my own content.
Not sure if it'd work on Netflix but my wife were pleasantly surprised to A&E and History apps on our apple tv suddenly forgetting how to do ads after I set up adguard home with a few extra filter lists...I did have to ok a few things the list blocked. But the apps work and seem to be adless, at least for now.
Yeah I regrettably* bought a year's subscription to Peacock and was also pleasantly surprised that my PiHole just blocked all the ads.
*This was when they were offering a year for 20 USD. They had advertised world cup streaming but neglected to mention that all the commentary was in Spanish with no English option. I ended up just streaming a Swiss TV channel because it was at least in a language I can understand.
You could just ditch all those apps and get Stremio with a Real-Debrid subscription. You can stream any content from any provider for ~$3/mo (including Netflix, A&E, History, Disney+, HBO Max, Prime Video, etc.) Ad*-free, of course.
Basically R-D works by downloading torrents to a dedicated server, so you can stream them instantly using a Netflix-like interface on your TV/tablet/PC/phone (via Stremio). And since they're direct downloads, you don't have to wait for seeds, nor do you need a VPN. It's like having a seedbox except anyone can add any torrent to it (and not just videos, but literally any torrent can be downloaded instantly).
Sorry if this reads like an ad, but I really want more people to know about this. There's a better way than paying for a bunch of streaming services, or waiting hours for people to seed. Or signing up for a private tracker and having to constantly worry about keeping your seeding ratio up.
For anyone who is unclear, this is a pirated content service, for better or worse.
And paying for it with a card with your name on it might be a bad idea...
EDIT: VPN or Usenet might be better and there are also pretty good tools.
You can always pay with Monero, which is completely anonymous if used correctly.
But I'm almost scared to mention this, given how much Lemmy hates crypto.
Or just use the torrentio plugin, no real debrid
Yeah but then you need a VPN and lose the ability to steam instantly, defeating the entire point. The Torrentio plugin works best with a Debrid service.
Not really a problem if you have decent enough internet and already use a vpn for other purposes but yes.
I have gigabit internet, Debrid is still faster.
Internet speed doesn't matter when people are leeching or a torrent just doesn't have many seeds. Debrid solves that problem. And it's cheaper than a VPN, which is perfect for people who don't need a VPN for other reasons.
Somehow more than 5 ish seeders are usually enough for it to start playing within seconds.
But im mostly watching episodes as they come out and 1k+ seeders is usual.
Good thing I already like digitizing my media for Plex
I mean I think I know what you mean I also think "digitizing" doesn't really describe it. Most media nowadays is digital to begin with. Even audio CDs store a digital format.
We now have a collection of maybe 400 DVDs (not pirated, legally purchased). Sure, everything we watch is reruns, but there are no commercials.
99% of the shit Netflix has is reruns anyways
Cable is dead! Long live Cable!
/s
Cable companies did the cable model because it was profitable. Netflix and others are slowly realizing that and moving towards it.
Yup. It was the same enshittification process. "Subscribe to cable. We don't have commercials!" Then a few years later, "Guess what?!? You're getting commercials!"
If that happens,i'll trakt + jellyfin the hell out of all their shitty shows. Just for kicks.
40 months of PIA is $80. So for $2 a month, you can have it all with no ads and no region locking.
Remember to use streamio so you don't have to download shit. 😉
What's PIA?
The shittiest VPN company that you shouldn’t trust ever.
I don't trust anyone, but I haven't heard bat things about PIA. That was just the first one I looked up. Did something happen that we shouldn't trust them? I know Nord is now suspect.
Bad things about PIA? Apart from the fact it was bought 5 years ago by Kape Technologies, a former malware distributor, involved in state sponsored espionage and mass surveillance, who also owns Cyberghost, Express VPN and Zenmate plus a plethora of VPN review sites and social network channels that promote its own products as top notch?
Shit like this is why I don't feel bad at all for pirating.
They raise their rates by 65% so they can continue to pay Hollywood actors to make crappy forgettable movies for the service
Don't forget the 5 BILLION dollars they just gave to WWE, a company that regularly goes to Saudi Arabia. A country so backwards in human rights that they don't allow women to work. So WWE's answer to this was to create a tornament just for the women. Called "The Great Moolah Classic". Only problem with that is, it happened just as the MeToo movement was happening. Now in case you're unaware, womens pro wrestling from the 1950s through the 1980s was dominated by "The Great Moolah".
Btw, I'M not saying she was great. Far from it. Thats just her stage name.
But if you were a woman, and you wanted to get into womens wrestling between 1950-1985 you NEEDED to go through The Great Moolah. Here's the problem though.
You had to live in a camp, where she controlled every aspect of your life from training through retirement. What she did with this control was appalling. She forced them to prostitute themselfs out to not only the male wrestlers, but also the rest of the general public in the area.
These women then had to give 100% of the money to Moolah, or else they'd be beaten.
And that's the tornament they tried to give as the consolation prize for women not being allowed to wrestle in Saudi Arabia. Oh, and when they were forced to change the name, almost IMMEDIATELY, they changed it to The Mae Young Classic. Mae Young was Moolah's best friend, and one of the people who would help beat the other women. That's still what it's called today. When they first introduced the trophy for it, the trophy was intentionally made to look like a vagina. "Here's your make believe trophy for winning a make believe tornament, as a consolation prize for very real restrictions on making very real money, and we shaped it like your genitals. Snickers, who sponsered the tornament balked when they saw their logo would be on that trophy, and they were forced to redesign it to something more generic. The tornament continues to this day.
And that's what Netflix just paid 5 BILLION dollars for. Either 3 or 5 years. I forget which.
Holy shit, do you have some more info or refs for this, this sounds unbelievably fucked up.
From the book The Chronicles of Mad Maxine and from Dark Side of the Ring S01E06.
Disclaimer: I only know what I just looked up. Not a big wrestling watcher personally.
From what I can tell there's two separate titles. The Mae Young Classic had two tournaments in 2017 & 2018. The Great Moolah was announced in 2018, subsequently changing the name to WrestleMania Women's Battle Royal. It also has only had two tournaments, in 2018 & 2019.
As for the logo/trophy, WrestleMania Women's Battle Royal looks like this, and the Mae Young Classic looks like this. I couldn't find any info on previous versions, but if there was one that looked more like a vagina, it might as well be an anatomical model.
Care to share what site you use to pirate? I haven't been in that loop for a while, but all these pricing increases for all these streaming services is driving me back.
https://fmhy.net/beginners-guide
In before "Removed by Mod"
Whoops, am I not supposed to?
Lemmy.World defederated from an instance known as the instance that has all the piracy. Then pushback from the userbase caused them to refederate. Then they defederated a SECOND time. Despite pushback from users AGAIN theystay defederated from them to this day.
So it wouldn't surprise me if they removed it.
Check out FMHY (Free Media Heck Yeah) they have a subreddit (I think) and a website. There's absolutely everything there for pirating.
rentry.co/megathread
links to pirate pretty much anything
123moviestv.net , bflixhd.to, yts.mx look for them through yandex search engine and not the google , google blocks them
for anime zorotv.to/home ,https://9anime.com.pl/
Kodi and RealDebrid
Do it, do it! One of us, one of us! 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
I love seeing the private trackers I use not mentioned here. If other sites have the spotlight, that's a win.
May I ask why you pirate crappy forgettable movies?
Netflix has no way to continue growing aside from increasing prices. That is a bad sign. They will just keep squeezing people. Your best bet is to stop subscribing.
Damn near every tech company and major utility provider has no way of growing aside from squeezing.
No matter where you turn you will be getting squeezed, and it'll just get worse every year that regulations don't catch up.
And if the U.S. has it's way, institutional regulation will be a thing of the past as a new wave of unchecked corporate oligarchy begins. And since the U.S's biggest export is crazy, it'll just spread....
Making the future more grim.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Anyone care to actually do anything about it? Seems like people are more concerned about abortion and things like that than everyone's collective livelihood.
Trustbusting would be a solution, but people gotta get behind it. Guess which guy running for President is moving in that direction? Hint: it's not the billionaire.
The shareholders are seeking to juice the company and throw it away as usual. Users need to see the writing on the wall and move on.
Genius MBA thinking of our time
Yea tbh it's business model is gonna be obsolete.
The bottom line is especially in a trash economy where the rich are bleeding everyone, no one is gonna wanna pay for digital luxuries.
I only shell out for hardware and food.
Streaming is going to end up exactly like cable, it feels inevitable. Adverts, package bundle deals, contracts will be the final thing where they lock you in for a "discount".
Yup, I'm playing with Jellyfin for our devices. I already have a fair amount of content in a digital format, so I'm mostly testing to see if offline playback works well.
So far so good, just need my wife and kids to approve and I can kill Netflix.
Do the shareholders care?
Cause they just want to squeeze Netflix while they still can before they jump ship. And at that time, Netflix dying and another streaming services surfacing would be ideal for savvy investors.
Netflix removing subscribers. What is their plan, zero subscribers?
Is it opposite day?
They've tested the waters, and people will most probably wind up staying, as their password crackdown demonstrated.
Do you have any data that shows Netflix didn’t lose subscribers in markets where they cracked down on password sharing? I keep seeing people saying this is the case, but all the news stories I’ve read say that Netflix is only adding subscribers in the cheaper markets (like India and South America).
I don't have a source, but it wasn't that Netflix didn't lose subscribers, it was that their revenues grew. Part of that was charging subscribers more, but a lot of that was the new ad-supported plans netted them more money than basic ad-free plans. Which is probably why they're now sunsetting the basic ad-free plans.
Slightly off topic, but starting 2025 they're going to stop providing quarterly subscriber numbers to focus on "other metrics" related to revenue and growth.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/netflix-to-stop-providing-subscriber-numbers-1235877111/
This is public record due to their financial reporting obligations as public company, but their password sharing crackdown resulted in not insignificant amounts of new subscribers.
Or at least, there was meaningful growth that occurred in time periods that aligned with those policies going into effect.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/09/business/netflix-password-sharing-results/index.html
That could be true, I was going on the fact of what they reported and how their stock jumped up because of what they said as well.
They'll never mention how many people left though (unless that info is out there too?)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/netflix-subscriber-growth-focus-gains-password-sharing-crackdown-seen-easing-2024-04-17/
Subscribers are subscribers are subscribers, the total is up so even if they lost some in the US/European market, the rest of the world makes up for it.
Emerging markets pay around $6 a month for Netflix. Basically the “password crackdown” markets are subsidizing the new subscriptions where Netflix is trying to gain a foothold. It’s the typical “get ‘em hooked, then start raising prices.”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/netflix-price-drop-international-password-sharing-1235332333/#!
Sure but if subscriptions were stagnating before and they're increasing more than ever, it ends up compensating for the loss of people who used to pay more.
Not only staying, they’ll stay and pay more
It's the classic "get people hooked with a free service then force them to pay"
Gotta bump up that "$/sub" metric!
Investors like a get rich or die trying mentality cause they don’t die, they leave.
remember when the adfree plan for netflix was 8.99?
Yup, and that's when I stopped buying DVDs and pirating. But with standard without ads being ~$15 with less selection, guess what I've gone back to doing?
They're passing off the price of inflation to the people
Hahahaha
My biggest beef is that the ad plans also limit your downloads. I use that feature a ton.
So now I just pirate everything.
We pay for an ad-free tier and our downloads "expired" when we were in the middle of nowhere. They still existed on our device and on the service, we just couldn't play them.
That got my wife annoyed enough that I think I can convince her to just buy DVDs again. $15/month is 1-2 DVDs/month, and that's about what we watch anyway. We won't get Netflix originals, but that's fine with me. If we ever need any of those, we can just binge for a month.
I joined the Plex server plan, it's better and works everywhere and I don't get price increases or ads
All the shows that I like I've been buying DVD or Blu-rays for, and then I rip them and put them on my Plex server. Just so I can watch some anytime, and not potentially damage the discs.
I don't have to worry about geofencing, Don't have to worry about a price change ever, Don't have to deal with commercials, Don't have to think if the shows that I like are going to disappear and maybe show up on a different provider, and generally higher quality audio and video.
Would it just be easier to use something like iTunes for movies/shows?
You'd have to remove the DRM protection to get the same results. But by that point it's no easier than ripping a blu ray, and with ripping you get the added benefit of having a physical copy.
Okay that makes sense. I have around 1,000 movies on iTunes so not sure if I’d have all the space for the dvds and would take a pretty long time to rip
Guess we are all lucky that we have options these days
I find putting a DVD into a DVD player without having to sign in, have credit, a credit card, and have wifi to be the easiest. Usually costs less too
I bet you still write checks also
Remember those few years when stores had a little machine they could feed the check into and it'd fill everything out for you?
And old people would still sit there and write it out
I'd say no. Because it's online and attached to your account it can be lost. If for some reason you lose access to your Apple account you lose everything you've bought. And a lot of these online services don't want you to share or transfer your account. So like if you pass away, most of these online services don't allow you to transfer the account to a living relative (per of the TOS) (granted I doubt there's much I could do to actually stop you if you just leave them out of it and just give the account to somebody).
Kids and spouse can still access everything since they are on my Apple family thing. I hear what you’re saying though.
Jellyfin + Wireguard VPN server says hello
Is it that the decade of 0% interest rates and angel funding for startups lulled us into unrealistically thinking we could get unlimited everything for 9.99 per month, or is it that companies are suddenly starting to rip off people?
As an end consumer it's impossible to gauge what is a proper price for entertainment.
Netflix has been profitable since 2003. This is greed.
It's probably the latter.
"Delivering shareholder value" has destroyed numerous companies, and I doubt it'll stop soon.
As with many things, it really is likely a mixture of both. Very possible that 9.99 was unrealistically low, but the current streaming market and "inflation" smoke screening is also enabling some real squeezing of consumers.
Not me! I gave all these streaming assholes the boot years ago.
It was maybe too low for their awesome library they had at the start (though their initial pricing was still more than a lot of their customers spent in a year for movies/TV prior).
It's criminally overpriced for their awful library now.
It's simple really
Is the boss a multimillionaire?
No: No problem
Yes: They're charging more than they need to
Also, on the "standard with ads" tier, they've removed the ability to chromecast.
Wow what a dumb way to basically gatekeep me from even moving to the ad tier.
The ads are added in the app. If you cast, the Chromecast can't add apps (yet) so they'd have to make ad streams instead, and switch between the streams show-ad-show which would take several seconds of loading screen each way and so on. Which is a level of fuckery even they shied away from.
TLDR they can't (easily) show ads during casting.
Kind of makes sense - casting is usually a webstream without extra dev effort. I'm not sure if you still can, but I used to circumvent twitch ads by casting from my phone. Not to excuse their shitty behaviour; I gave up on them years ago and started hosting my own content.
Not sure if it'd work on Netflix but my wife were pleasantly surprised to A&E and History apps on our apple tv suddenly forgetting how to do ads after I set up adguard home with a few extra filter lists...I did have to ok a few things the list blocked. But the apps work and seem to be adless, at least for now.
Yeah I regrettably* bought a year's subscription to Peacock and was also pleasantly surprised that my PiHole just blocked all the ads.
*This was when they were offering a year for 20 USD. They had advertised world cup streaming but neglected to mention that all the commentary was in Spanish with no English option. I ended up just streaming a Swiss TV channel because it was at least in a language I can understand.
You could just ditch all those apps and get Stremio with a Real-Debrid subscription. You can stream any content from any provider for ~$3/mo (including Netflix, A&E, History, Disney+, HBO Max, Prime Video, etc.) Ad*-free, of course.
Basically R-D works by downloading torrents to a dedicated server, so you can stream them instantly using a Netflix-like interface on your TV/tablet/PC/phone (via Stremio). And since they're direct downloads, you don't have to wait for seeds, nor do you need a VPN. It's like having a seedbox except anyone can add any torrent to it (and not just videos, but literally any torrent can be downloaded instantly).
Sorry if this reads like an ad, but I really want more people to know about this. There's a better way than paying for a bunch of streaming services, or waiting hours for people to seed. Or signing up for a private tracker and having to constantly worry about keeping your seeding ratio up.
For anyone who is unclear, this is a pirated content service, for better or worse.
And paying for it with a card with your name on it might be a bad idea...
EDIT: VPN or Usenet might be better and there are also pretty good tools.
You can always pay with Monero, which is completely anonymous if used correctly.
But I'm almost scared to mention this, given how much Lemmy hates crypto.
Or just use the torrentio plugin, no real debrid
Yeah but then you need a VPN and lose the ability to steam instantly, defeating the entire point. The Torrentio plugin works best with a Debrid service.
Not really a problem if you have decent enough internet and already use a vpn for other purposes but yes.
I have gigabit internet, Debrid is still faster.
Internet speed doesn't matter when people are leeching or a torrent just doesn't have many seeds. Debrid solves that problem. And it's cheaper than a VPN, which is perfect for people who don't need a VPN for other reasons.
Somehow more than 5 ish seeders are usually enough for it to start playing within seconds. But im mostly watching episodes as they come out and 1k+ seeders is usual.
Good thing I already like digitizing my media for Plex
I mean I think I know what you mean I also think "digitizing" doesn't really describe it. Most media nowadays is digital to begin with. Even audio CDs store a digital format.
We now have a collection of maybe 400 DVDs (not pirated, legally purchased). Sure, everything we watch is reruns, but there are no commercials.
99% of the shit Netflix has is reruns anyways
Cable is dead! Long live Cable!
/s
Cable companies did the cable model because it was profitable. Netflix and others are slowly realizing that and moving towards it.
Yup. It was the same enshittification process. "Subscribe to cable. We don't have commercials!" Then a few years later, "Guess what?!? You're getting commercials!"
If that happens,i'll trakt + jellyfin the hell out of all their shitty shows. Just for kicks.
40 months of PIA is $80. So for $2 a month, you can have it all with no ads and no region locking.
Remember to use streamio so you don't have to download shit. 😉
What's PIA?
The shittiest VPN company that you shouldn’t trust ever.
I don't trust anyone, but I haven't heard bat things about PIA. That was just the first one I looked up. Did something happen that we shouldn't trust them? I know Nord is now suspect.
Bad things about PIA? Apart from the fact it was bought 5 years ago by Kape Technologies, a former malware distributor, involved in state sponsored espionage and mass surveillance, who also owns Cyberghost, Express VPN and Zenmate plus a plethora of VPN review sites and social network channels that promote its own products as top notch?
https://restoreprivacy.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn-cyberghost-pia-zenmate-vpn-review-sites/
TIL thanks! Which VPN would you suggest?
I am PIA User atm and my subscription will end next year. So, I am still undedcided between Mullvad or protonvpn
Mullvad doesn't support port forwarding, so it's not an option for the issue discussed here
Private Internet Access is a VPN service.
Private Internet Access, it's a VPN that handles streaming and torrenting well.
Pain in advance or otherwise known as prepay.
Pia?
It's a vpn. There are many, that's just one example.
I'd take a PIA for $2 per month
The peasants will pay... Sad reality.