not if you raise the black flag
I did that many years ago and the fact that all content is in one place instead of multiple apps is so nice.
I miss the early days of Netflix when that held true too. If I remember right piracy was down too. But everyone wanted a piece of the stupid pie and we’re back to where we started all over again
I think that’s what they mean. They sail the high seas and put all the booty in one place, like a Plex media server.
Yeah, I was agreeing and relating it to the good ol days when pirating for a one asp experience wasn’t needed unless you really wanted to.
Now we’re back to that’s the only way to easily get it all in one place is pirating. Apple TV seems to sort of have that ability but it’s not seamless because it takes you to whatever app the video is on, which still means you have to pay for all the streams.
I’m just back to buying Blu rays. To me it’s the safer option, you legally own your product and you can host everything you want yourself still. MakeMKV is a great tool.
I check em out from the library
Plex and Google TV also work similarly, universal search that then opens the streaming app
If they would just fix their damn offline downloads on the app…
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This comment should be at the top. We have a similar industry that has at least figured out a model giving enough value that listeners are willing to pay. Why not video? We also had a brief golden age of streaming video where Netflix showed how it could be. Why not now? We’re in the middle of a huge industry change where people are dropping cable after so many years of abuse. Why can’t they learn?
We can’t blame the companies completely, Netflix was having to much power and profits. Spotify for instance is still at a lose, and so are a lot of music streaming services. Netflix was very comfortable and starting to make their own content, promoting that content and not sharing the data with the studio’s.
Secondly consumers are not the smartest bunch and signed up immediately when HBO and Disney+ came to the market, not understanding that it was at introduction price to lure people away from other streaming services.
So people had the chance to have a more centralised streaming platform for tv or film, but some like to brag that they watched it already some weeks before anybody else. Plus most countries had a lockdown, so people needed entertainment.
In private hands this cannot work anyways IMO. We need to force an interoperable standard if we want to stop companies from screwing everyone over just to make a line go up.
It’s like if streaming platforms were good.
Even when we had a few streaming services, we’d end up pirating some stuff that was available because we incorrectly assumed it wasn’t on one of them and it’s just too annoying to have to look up where something is every time.
So we’d tend to go the piracy route first if we were seeking something out and only use the streaming services if we knew off the top of our heads where something was.
My Plex Server is a bastion of hope. I’m not paying for another streaming service ever again.
I’ve been a Plex user for over a decade now. I’m not impressed with the direction they’re taking, but the alternatives aren’t quite there yet in terms of polish. I hope that by the time they fuck it all up there’ll be a better solution to switch to.
I’ve used Plex off and on for a few years, getting more into it as streaming prices have been rising. What direction are they taking that you don’t particularly like? I’ve also seen Kodi - which I’m intrigued by. Any thoughts there?
Are you talking about plex media server for local files? If you are still looking for polished alternative check jellyfin. It is amazing
How is this different to using stremio?
Piracy is now easier than ever when you use torrent streaming clients.
Usenet is even easier with more reliable quality. Strong recommend.
Most don’t like usenet since it cost money, but you’re absolutely right, usenet is the best way. It’s what I’ve been using for over a decade now lol
For the cost of one streaming subscription I’ve got all content, downloads at full speed and is private. Can’t imagine life without Usenet and sonarr/radarr now
I need a tutorial on this
Get yourself a nice newsgroup, and an nzb indexer(search site for newsgroups) . Install nzbget, sonarr and radarr and Google for the parts you get stuck on.
I recommend a 2nd newsgroup subscription at a different place, because (in layman’s terms) to appease the dmca strikes they delete a single file of the download, and chances are a different server deleted a different file, so your downloads are complete enough to parse the rest together.
Can this be traced by the police or other state agencies? Or is this truly anonymous?
This is the one I used years ago: https://blog.harveydelaney.com/configuring-your-usenet-provider-and-indexer-with-sonarr-radarr/
The nuts and bolts should be the same. I imagine his recommendations on what backbones and newsgroups to subscribe to are out of date, though.
If not for live sports. That’s the only reason I’ve had “cable” off and on for the last decade
Shh, you trying to get c/technology banned from lemmy.world?
Costs of streaming from my Plex server haven’t changed.
Laughs in jellyfin
I tried jellyfin, but it just doesn’t do all of what I need it to do.
Check out
Kodi doesn’t, either. I also don’t like the interface.
thx for the suggestion, though :)
Fair, i feel ya :)
Fuck yeahhhh bro
25 terabytes of mostly 2160p content and growing.
Ha, I’m pretty much exactly at 25TB as well. Though everything is 1080p max.
Still great!
I used to have 4k stuff, but my server is used by few family members and friends, and streaming 4k was just taking up to much resources. Upgrading to a more powerful NAS is planed when money is availible.
Also 4k uses conisderable more disk space and while I have 4k screen, I find 1080p with a good bitrate more than sufficiant for me. That saves a ton of storage.
Still better than dealing with ads. That’s my red line.
I absolutely refuse to watch programming with ads, free or paid. I won’t do it. My time is limited and I’m not every going to willingly hand over a portion of my life to advertisements.
I’m never going back. If ad-free options go away or become too expensive, I’ll simply stop watching shit. There isn’t a price at which ad-supported programming becomes attractive.
I’d love to see the Weird Al movie. I won’t, however, because Roku won’t let me pay to watch it.
So watch it pirated. They get $0 either way.
Ha! Weird Al is bad ass.
This is one of the greatest replies I’ve ever seen. Rats off to ya Al!
what a legend
There isn’t a price at which ad-supported programming becomes attractive.
Even free isn’t good enough for ads. Ads are horrendous. They don’t even try to make them good anymore. It’s just “but our shit, dummies!”. Remember the milk commercials? That was probably the height of advertising. It’s all been shit since then.
Corpos kicked the artists out
What were the milk commercials?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gkqzxss8Ss&pp=ygUPbWlsayBBYXJvbiBidXJy
They had a string of commercials that were all pretty entertaining back in the day.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=0Gkqzxss8Ss&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Preeeeeeach!
yarr harr fiddle-dee-dee
being a pirate is alright with me
Do what you whant cuz a pirate is free
I hear Plex has a lovely, sleek interface once you turn off certain unneeded bells & whistles.
idk tho
What bells and whistles should one turn off - our server wouldn’t mind a facelift
I’ve heard tell that at the account level, individual users can turn off things like free movies & TV series, enhanced search results and all that to get a cleaner experience.
I the web UI, mouse over your avatar, go to account settings, and disable pretty much everything under ‘online media sources’. Enjoy the pure, clean Plex experience. Just see what the server offers, no more, no less.
I second this
🏴☠️🦜
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This is a lousy article rehashing an article behind a paywall.
The cost they have is $87 a month. There is so much that’s confusing about this. They don’t specify how many streaming services they are counting in that, but it’s a good guess that is about 5, each at about $17 a month. I feel I have too many streaming services and share accounts with family, and I can stream from about 7, pay for one and watch 1.5. If I couldn’t share accounts, I wouldn’t have the accounts. I pretty much watch star trek and whatever show someone tells me to watch.
They also don’t specify what $87 a month gets you in cable. Around me that’s about basic cable prices, which is significantly less content presented in a less convenient format and is almost entirely reruns filled to brim with commercials.
Not only is the article missing key information it also misrepresents the information it has.
Note: I’m sure people will tell me to pirate everything, but there are reasons to not pirate. And it doesn’t address that this is a poorly written article giving incomplete and incorrect information.
Personally, the lack of ads is a big one for me. I will not watch ad filled content. Any time I’m on vacation and turn on a hotel TV and have to deal with ads it is so frustrating. Especially now that content is made for streaming, so there aren’t logical ad breaks in the story. Just random hard cuts in the middle of content.
Yeah I’m curious how they get that number. I look at it as my math is Internet ($50)+Hulu Bundle ($21)+Prime($12) is $83/mo
Can they really count internet costs which most people would need even if they weren’t streaming?
Great point. I guess there’s maybe someone that doesn’t need internet in there home. But the average person these days can’t function without it.
I was doing it to try to make their claim seem sane. Are people really on 4-5 streaming services?
There definitely are. My partner has Netflix, Prime, Peacock, and the Disney plus bundle. I feel like it isn’t that uncommon of a scenario tbh.
I have access to Financial Times, and this is what they showed in their article
people that pirate give advertising its power.
pay your content creators and don’t tolerate ads.
Back to the high seas it is.
I’m not paying for 5 streaming services to watch 1 show on each. So now I’m paying for no streaming services.
Convenience as a reasonable price was the deal. It it neither convenient nor reasonably priced any more.
Cable TV all over again. Region locked DVD all over again.
I pay for Hulu, Max, Disney+, Prime, and get Netflix for free. Half the time, I still can’t find the show or movie I want to watch. But 99.99% of the time I can find a torrent for it within 20 seconds of searching. Not only is pirating cheaper, but it’s more convenient and more user friendly these days.
I find it funny as hell that when I search for “where can I stream X?” Most of the time, I can only watch the thing on a pirate streaming site, unless I want to pay $15.99 for a single viewing on Amazon. lol fuck that.
My move is to go to the library and borrow stuff on DVD. I dunno where you are but up here in Canada you would be surprised what you can find legally for free if you got a library card.
I think more convenient and user friendly is a bit of a stretch.
My wife gets confused by the remote and different profiles. My parents needed me to explain how to use Netflix more than once. Saying going to your PC and finding a torrent is convenient and user friendly isn’t true. But the point that having to search where to stream a particular movie or show isn’t user friendly is also true.
I wouldn’t say that pirating is user-friendly, only that it can be more user-friendly than logging into and searching through multiple streaming services. That of course pre-supposes that you have some knowledge of how to torrent and where to find torrent files.
Plex or Jellyfin (Jf is more preferred by the sailors, but I like Plex quite a bit)
Jellyfin & underlaying infrastructure (sea ports, taxi ships, management ships, pirate ships & so on).
How do you torrent on Plex ? I got it but it doesn’t do anything for me ?
Plex is just a media server. You have to acquire content through some other means, then you can host it on a Plex server and stream it to any device that has the Plex app installed.
I have a Plex server that my entire family has logins for, and I put whatever movies or shows people are interested in. Basically you can make your own mini Netflix.
I got Plex on a RasPi3 and an external 2TB. I have to limit to 1080p/x264 but works quite well.
If I want 4K I’ll buy the disc, downloading even Blu-ray quality is so goddamn big.
I had a pi4 but I found it struggled with transcoding and multiple streams, ended up with too much buffering.
So it’s just a streaming app. Similar to bubble up or Miracast?
Not quite, I think those just stream over Wi-Fi like Chromecast?
Plex has a full media server application that your can run on a computer, and you can stream your media from it over the internet to any device that has the Plex client app.
I have a Plex server set up and running on an old laptop in my bedroom with a huge library of movies and TV shows. It acts like basically any streaming service such as Netflix, but it’s my own stuff. I can watch from anywhere on any device that has a Plex client app. I can also send invitations to friends and family so they can access it, too.
You don’t, you use Plex to make the experience of watching what you obtain easier. Netflix tier ease of use.
How is it easier?
In what way ? I haven’t used Plex yet. It shows you what you have on your other streams. I tried to play a vid I have downloaded but it refused to play. Don’t get the hype.
Would just use a pirate site and stream from thereb
Add a library in plex pointing to where your personal video files are stored. If you automate the downloads with the *arrs radarr, sonarr etc plex turns into basically Netflix for your local media.
How do I add arrs radarr ? Is that an app or droid ?
Torrents are the hardest way to access things that are streaming on various sites. Or so I’ve heard. If you don’t need to watch everything in 8k it’s actually really easy. Just need an ad blocker and a quick search online
Some times I think maybe humanity has reached too far with technology. You’re absolutely right, lots of people get easily confused over even very simple things. It’s depressing to think about.
We’re all specializing in different things, and sometimes we get stretched thin. It’s understandable that most people have a hard time with more technical aspects of the digital world (and even the simpler aspects of it, due to constant innovations and paradigm shifts), but in this scenario in specific, it can pay off to be the more knowledgeable technical user, since you could set up Plex with *arr services to automate everything, and then just serve Plex on a golden platter to friends and family. It’s what I’m doing, recently set up Overseerr and friends are already using it to request content, and a couple of other friends are helping with moderating request and fixing minor issues on Radarr and Sonarr. I’m even getting donations from them in order to expand storage and improve infrastructure. It’s great, and I strive to ease the subscription cost burden of those around me.
The wife and I are trying to watch all the conjuring/anabelle/nun movies. The movies are scattered across several services and makes it a pain to watch. Kodi is one search away from what I’m looking for.
I need to get a VPN
Download a file, run on any player, on any device. It’s always been more convenient, online services had to catch up to filesharing, not the other way around, and in many ways owe their existence to non-commercial entities showing how it could be done. They might figure out a good way of doing it, until the executives get involved and want to put their stamp on it.
Lol…wtf is this trash article…Netflix is struggling to survive. Bullshit, they made 12B profit last year.
The article makes it out like all the big players are at a loss…they’re not…they brining in Bs in profit.
The price hikes are greed, and of course the consumers will pay it.
Disney+ have increased the price cause theyre losing customers. That seems like it will work.
Facebook did the same thing. Users were engaging less because of stupid changes Facebook added, so they added even stupider changes like filling people’s feeds with 98% ads. That of course drove away the remaining people so now the content feed is 99.9% advertising and “recommend” crap that nobody asked for or wants.
They must have hired on a bunch of old Comcast executives!
However, media execs acknowledged that the prices being charged by streaming services were unsustainable, and that a “crash” would follow – where companies would be forced to increase prices or go out of business.
Absolutely nobody believes you.
Unfortunately the latter instance was recently defederated by lemmy.world
Yea … lemmy.world is probably not the “everything” instance some people were hoping … but more the “vanilla” instance (which also has a place IMO).
Vanilla instance for vanilla people.
Edit: LMAO I’m on .world too folks (⁀ᗢ⁀)
Completely unrelated to the topic but isn’t it strange how vanilla has somehow become a negative? Vanilla ice cream being the default is because pretty much everyone enjoys vanilla. It’s a fantastic (albeit now very common) flavour.
High quality vanilla ice cream is easily the best. I’m talking, no eggs, very dense, no carrageenan or other crap like that, and actual vanilla bean. The stuff that tastes like tea and flowers and vanilla. It’s amazing. Also expensive, but it’s a treat I only get every few months.
I highly suggest trying to find an ice cream like this around if you even can.
Vanilla bean gangs rise up
eggs in ice cream is so good though
Real vanilla is also very expensive, so having an exotic and expensive flavour as the default is pretty weird.
Community*
Instance is still federated.
Not the entire instance, they only blocked the piracy community.
Yet another reason to spread out and not centralize on lemmy.world.
I haven’t used lemmy.world in a few weeks as it’s always down when I want to use it. Went back to my standby.
It is a shame that once you’ve signed up for a community you’re not allowed to make a user account on any other instance.
Yeah. And it’s a shame when they “ban” something, there aren’t like hundreds of different instances that can still easily access that content.
Some smart people should really come up with a decentralized federated system so these “bans” become total non-issues.
Ah well, one can dream.
Huh - a data network that routes traffic around missing or blocked nodes. That sounds like an advanced project from some kind of Defense agency. Someone should patent it - an Interconnected Network; I’ll bet it would be super popular. I wonder what they’d call it.
Heard about it. That’s a shame. There’s really nothing illegal there. Admins of my instance make a community voting before defederating.
I think I read somewhere that’s it’s possible to migrate your account to another instance. The idea of Lemmy is that we’re not at the mercy of someone’s whims.
It is not possible currently to migrate an account. There are tools that let you migrate eg. Your list of subscribed communities, but your posts and comments can’t go with you.
The instance wasn’t defedared, but the piracy community was blocked.
Wait where was this announced?
It wasn’t initially announced. Later they made a statement via discord 🙄
It’s only piracy communities they banned though. Not entire instances.
I guess I can understand their reasoning somewhat as the way Lemmy servers fetches data from the fediverse can become a liability, but I’m disappointed about the process and communication.
That said, I tried switching to some of the lesser restricted instances today, but I just don’t think I can be bothered to spend enough time blocking all the $hit there, so I’ll probably stay here still.
There are tools such as LASIM for transferring your subscriptions and blocks to another account.
That looks nice, I’ll run it on a few accounts anyways, nice to have backups available without having to start from scratch.
However, Lemmy.World was already defederated from a few instances and from the looks of it I would have to do add a huge amount of new blocks to stay sane on a completely unfiltered instance.
Yeah I’ve only used it for backing up to alts. Maybe make another acct on an instance with a similar defed list? Or does your app support filtering instances outright?
Why?
good thing I’m not on world 😂
Well, shit. Does that mean I’m cut off from all their content?
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Bruh I’m not even on Lemmy.world you could see that by clicking on my profile
the Liftoff app shows it for everyone 😏 It should be a default feature imo
That article is full of it. I was paying $120-150/month for cable on top of Internet. YoutubeTV is still only $75. I don’t even bother with YoutubeTV anymore. That was way too much money per month and despite 100+ channels, there was almost nothing worth while to watch. I’m not paying $75/month for Saturday Night Live a few times per year and MSNBC on in the background while I work.
I have Netflix and Disney+. When the kids are gone I will also get rid of those. Netflix is a joke now. It takes me so much time scrolling to find a show that I even want to watch, that I usually fall asleep before that can happen. Disney+ filled their service with horrid crap from Star Wars, Marvel, and other formerly beloved intellectual property that they have sullied and ruined.
Bottom line. The Streaming services are just as bad or worse than cable was and is. The quality of the shows is mostly so low that there is nothing worth paying $75, $20, $15, or even $5 per month for. I will happily pay zero because that is what streaming and cable shows are worth, for the most part, right now.
If anyone would please just make some quality shows I would happily pay a reasonable price for it. There has been maybe one show this entire year that thought was good and that was Star Trek Strange New Worlds. Guess what? It isn’t worth paying Paramount+ for a whole year just for one show. Sorry, but they all need to get their act together. Peak TV is long gone. It is Peak Crap TV now.
Severance on Apple was outstanding!
The Expanse on Amazon is good.
DS9 on Paramount.
Seinfeld on Netflix.
The thing is that I’m not interested in paying for a different service for every single show. Star Trek used to be on Netflix until Paramount got greedy and decided to spin up their own shitty service. You used to be able to get almost everything with 1-2 subscriptions. We used to pirate until Netflix and Amazon made good enough products that people decided they were worth the money.
These media companies fought tooth and nail against streaming, but Netflix made it possible. Netflix proved the business model. Now everyone wants to pull their content and put up their own shitty service with barely functional controls. They fought against progress until progress proved profitable, and now they want the whole pie. Fuck them. We’re going back to piracy.
The good thing is that you don’t have to sign up for all the services; sign up for a few. Once you see all the content that you want, cancel and sign up for something else.
Yep. Disney+ (for now).
Netflix, HBO, and Hulu gradually cancelled over the last few years.
What’s stupid of them is that if they’d stayed around $8-10/mo each (ad-free), I probably would have stayed subscribed forever. Now they each get nothing.
Biggest blocker I get for doing this is the family plan… There’s at least one out two in the household who are watching Netflix to mean we keep it, and I don’t want to downgrade as they take away the HD streams… That’s my biggest peeve, HD/4K should be standard, not a premium (yes I know, it’s more data but we’re not in the 90’s anymore.
It has pushed a lot of people back to piracy, what did these money grabbing schmucks think would happen
Most still cost about that much for their base packages. Just rotate them based on what you’re currently watching. No streaming service requires more than a month to month commitment. This just ensures that content stays fresh as they know their base of subscribers will be rotating on quality like this. It’s a good thing.
Or if they were willing to continue selling to Netflix instead of trying to pull off their own abusive service, they’d be more likely to get my money
I’m not in the US, and even though most (but not all) services adjust for local pricing, finding and keeping track of where something is (often isn’t, or not anymore) available to stream is more of a hassle (PITA really) than going to my favorite magnet site.
Just like streaming music where 95% of the content I want is available on all providers, I’d pay for an all-in tv-streaming service. I do buy digital/physical copies of music through Bandcamp. It’s all about convenience.
Roku helps with that as it has a global search. Maybe other streaming hardware does too. Not sure.
I am happy and a bit surprised that music streaming ended up so good.
PlayStation of all places has this. I will often turn it on just to see if something is available on one of the services I share with family. Then I turn to sketchy streaming sites or the public library.
Roku isn’t available in my “area”, so it (still) says. It’s a bummer because I wouldn’t have any issues with paying to binge something at high quality.
Edit: I have used justwatch.com in the past, but it isn’t always correct or up-to-date either.
Try reelgood.com
Unfortunately, I’m neither in the US nor the UK.
But can you constrain that global search by the services you subscribe to? It’s not useful to find all the places I can’t watch something
And can you constrain the search by language? One of the things that made Netflix easier to give up was the flood of search results in languages I don’t speak
I think the price hikes are basically relying on or incorporating this practice into their pricing models.
I do wonder though if we’ll see changes made to the cancellation policies. I’ve certainly been expecting a change there for years.
I do wonder though if we’ll see changes made to the cancellation policies. I’ve certainly been expecting a change there for years.
What kind of changes to the cancellation policies are you imagining?
That you can’t cancel each month? Like a six or twelve month minimum?
That’s not a change in cancellation policy; that’s a change in package pricing and availability.
Well, rather the subscriptions. IE, no monthly subscriptions but 6-monthly or 12-monthly. Or cancellation fees.
No idea if my expectation is valid, but it intuitively seems to me like an obvious way to grab some cash.
If anybody is interested: an old workstation/server costs about 150€, a 2TB external Hdd 50€, that’s about all you need to self-host your Netflix.
to proceed flash a Linux distro of your choice (I recommend Debian 12 stable) follow a tutorial on YT on how to install it, it’s very simple.
Download and configure jellyfin. Open the 8096/8099 port on your router.
If you live in a country where downloading “Linux ISOs” is frowned upon, be sure to use a VPN while downloading the latest Linux Mint release for your jellyfin server.
Load those fancy new kali Linux live CDs on your jellyfin servers, download clients for all your devices and enjoy!
Guides for everything I said can be found online, expecially on YouTube.
Just to add: jellyfin is free and open source: you know it does not spy on you and it does not build a profile on you to then sell your data to ad companies, a huge plus if you ask me.
