The TV streaming apps broke their promises, and now they’re jacking up prices
arstechnica.com
cross-posted from: https://yiffit.net/post/1072752
For a moment, it seemed like the streaming apps were the things that could save us from the hegemony of cable TV—a system where you had to pay for a ton of stuff you didn't want to watch so you could see the handful of things you were actually interested in.
Archived version: https://archive.ph/K4EIh
Piracy has steadily been getting more accessible and easy to use (see: Jellyfin, Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr etc.). There is basically no reason anymore to pay for any digital context, especially considering the streaming services are screwing over both the users and the creators. I like to support game developers that make really enjoyable games, but I can't and won't tolerate any shitty subscriptions that offer increasingly less content for increasingly exorbitant prices
Streaming services are dead to me rn. I’m paying £10/month to watch what I want when I want by using usenet (including electricity). Instead of paying for Netflix prime hbo Apple TV etc etc for over £10/month EACH.
Nice to see polish people on lemmy :)
Piracy and software was already really easy to use a decade ago ( sick beard / couch potato ) it’s just that the services at the time were good enough that you could watch practically everything on Netflix +1 so it wasn’t really a problem to stomach the cost. now I need 7 different subscriptions to watch shows I’m interested in which is a ball ache
I’ve already made the decision to sail the high seas in 2017 and selfhost my media.
Best decision I’ve ever made.
Sonarr + radarr + jellyfin
I never stopped, but I doubled down a good 10 years ago when Netflix first announced they were gonna put an end to people getting around geolocking. I'm Canadian. I'd pay (at the time) for US Netflix 100%. Canadian Netflix wasn't worth the cost of the pot to piss in.
Spun up a Plex server, set up Sonarr, Jackett/Prowlarr, Radarr, Tautulli, and now I am Netflix for 20 people lmao.
Edit: And I'd have it no other way.
That’s the way!
I feel your pain as I had Canadian Netflix around 2015. I was bummed when I knew that the new seasons of Suits (iirc) wouldn’t be available in Canadian Netflix for a couple of months.
I had to watch it in putlockers while I was paying for a freaking streaming service.
Such a mess lol. I take pride in knowing that every movie, tv show, comedy special, album, game (up until the ps era cause i'm not made of hard drive money), comic book, novel, piece of software, basically anything I ever enjoyed over the course of my life (as well as a couple terabytes of random data hoarder shit) are sitting 2 feet away from my fingers at all times.
@deleted
Does your ISP still provide Usenet access or do you subscribe to a Usenet provider?
Paying $9 a month for Usenet makes me wonder if I shouldn’t just keep paying for Hulu
I don’t think my ISP provides it.
Id suggest you to setup sonarr and radarr behind a vpn as it’s a set and forget setup.
Fully automated.
@deleted
Oh? You don’t have to setup a usenet provider to Sonaar work?
I’m out of the loop then. You have any recommendations for modern setup tutorials?
Most (if not all?) of the *arrs can use torrents. edit: as for guides, i would just check out yams.media.
What do you mean? What does isp have to do with Usenet?
@iHUNTcriminals
@owiseedoubleyou @deleted
Usenet access used to be included by ISPs. It’s been a long time since that was standard. I’m not sure which Usenet providers are worthwhile now.
yeah. but i think most of them excluded binaries, even back then.
@rufus
@owiseedoubleyou @deleted @iHUNTcriminals
No, binaries were included. That was the main way binaries were exchanged for a time.
I'm pretty sure around where i live you did not get the alt.binaries groups except if you went to a proper usenet provider and payed. the ISPs didn't want to pay for all of the storage. but this was a long time ago and i wasn't yet interested in stuff like that. maybe i misremember.
My ISP has their own usenet servers. I get access to all the good shit via it, for free.
Good news for Lemmy. Pirate the fuck out of everything and never ever feel any guilt about it comrades.
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Trusting promises of corporations is like believing that a wild cobra won't bite you. It's definitely possible, highly unlikely they will keep the promise.
Of course Netflix was going to increase prices and reduce their offering. What did anyone think would happen? They’d just decide that a stable profit was good enough?
I thought this was a facetious comment, but you're right https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html
My memories go as far back to when a full commercial block was 60 seconds and only happened once in the middle of a movie and usually around once per hour on regular tv.
24 years of continuous piracy. All I pay for is a seedbox. Paying these scummy corporations nothing each month feels great!
May I ask what are the benefits of a seedbox?
So with a seedbox its basically an offsite swrver that you tell to download the files you want, rhen you download them direct from the seedbix. Because theyre dedicated servers you get better download and upload speeds for preserving your ratio, you don't have to use local storage to seed things, and it can be safer if your seed box is in another country because your isp doesn't see any torrent traffic.
...but if you're paying for that seedbox with your credit card, aren't you creating a pretty clear paper trail between you and your piracy?
If the seedbox is in a country that doesn't care about torrenting and is hosted by a company that doesn't care, they're the only ones who would be aware of it. It's not illegal to pay for a server or to download files from your server.
What countries don't care about torrenting? Surely most countries with decent bandwidth are signed up to WIPO?
Lots of countries don't care about torrenting , at least not the way the US does. Without the riaa/mpaa going after individual users can you point me to a single high profile legal case involving an average downloader? People in alot of other countries don't even bother with a VPN. Not sure why you're bringing up a un group as I'm pretty sure that's mostly for diplomatic disputes, I've definitely never heard of it used to prosecute someone for downloading movies. This info is all widely available online. I'm happy to have answered a one off question for you but if you're just trying to be difficult I have no interest in continuing to answer your questions when the info is very easy to obtain with a quick search. There's lots of torrent friendly countries out there where the movie studios don't make legal policy.
I'm honestly not trying to be difficult. I live in the UK and used to live in the Netherlands so my concerns are largely with European jurisdictions. In both countries the government has taken steps to prevent piracy and the UK recently changed its laws to ensure 10 years prison time, though that's for "commercial" piracy only. They've also brought in Draconian new surveillance laws explicitly to combat piracy.
I bring all this up because I'm honestly confused. A lot of the seedboxes I see are based in the Netherlands (fantastic bandwidth there!) but I know that people living there are generally quite fearful of being caught torrenting (newsgroups are more popular for this reason). It seems reasonable to me that given that the authorities across Europe generally play well together that they'd share enforcement of this sort of thing, so I don't understand how feralhosting manages to function then.
I mention WIPO just because it's an international agreement that all signatories would make efforts to prevent IP violations, so I assume that this means that most countries would at least share information on this stuff.
It just seems weird is all. A seedbox in Egypt, sure, they're not likely to care about American copyrights all that much, but the Netherlands? Germany? How does that even work?
Idk I think it's just not worth those countries time to waste resources on individual piracy, just to enforce American copyright. The Netherlands is probably worried about protecting their own content, and regardless, it's the seedbox company taking most of the risk. You lived there so you'd probably know better but I haven't heard of anyone in the Netherlands being prosecuted, and definitely not anyone in North America being prosecuted for what's on a NL server. Idk its always risky I guess but seedboxes seem to minimize the risk similar to a VPN and come with other benefits if you're into private trackers etc.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Discovery's David Zaslav have also indicated that their services were initially priced "too low" in an effort to draw a huge and unendingly expanding subscriber base.
In the early-to-mid 2010s, a subscription to Netflix and Hulu and your friend’s borrowed HBO password could get you access to the vast majority of all the TV that was worth watching.
Netflix had a huge archive of older shows plus a slowly growing library of its buzzy releases like Orange Is the New Black, Jessica Jones, and Stranger Things.
Not content to let Netflix have what looked like a lucrative new market all to itself the companies that made and distributed TV decided one by one as the decade wore on that it was time to create their own apps and generate their own subscription revenue.
Tech companies also decided to jump in, with Amazon Prime Video pushing into expensive scripted dramas and Apple TV+ becoming relevant by dint of throwing untold gobs of money at all kinds of projects.
Netflix announced its first subscriber loss in a decade in early 2022, cratering its stock; despite some recovery, it's still only worth about two-thirds what it was at its peak in late 2021.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Corporations gradually making something worse so they can sustain profits?
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Also love how they're all going to make a cheaper plan with ads so they can either double dip or push you towards the more expensive plan. Nothing but making things shittier for the end user, love that innovation.
Disney's Bob Iger openly said that he would prefer more people use the ad tier because it was more profitable.
Netflix's ad tier is also more profitable.
Stremio is pretty cool. Allows for streaming torrents with a lot of seeders. Watch most TV series and movies on there nowdays
Any good guides on setting it up?
idk if it has other capabilities, but to use on android basically just install it from the play store then install a bunch of community plugins for various sites. torrient io scrapes most public trackers
can cast to TVs too if your phone/tv has the capability
stremio has gotten way worse after rarbg went down. doesnt seem to scrape torrentgalaxy correctly even with the torrent already cached and i have no idea how to fix it
::: spoiler Cant have mid-stream ads on a torrent
Yet
😔
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