Dude, $23 a month just to watch 4k content is already too fucking much.
I’ve already cancelled them, but when I have the means, I’m building a Jellyfin server. Fuck streaming services
I’m expecting to hike my rate of piracy in 2024 as I continue to take a bigger bite out of overall corporate profits.
take a bigger bite out of overall corporate profits.
Don’t co-adopt Corporate gaslighting. They can call it “opportunity cost”, “expected return” or other bullshit. But it’s all castles in the air dreamed up by profiteers.
It’s never their money to begin with. It only becomes so because they want everyone to believe that making a copy of software deprives others from using it like physical goods.
The truth is that if somebody was going to pirate software, then they were never going to buy it in the first place and it’s greedy and mentally ill to think otherwise.
Sorry to say, you’ve mistakenly made one hell of a generalisation on that last sentence. Other than that one stinky turd, the rest is spot-on.
The truth is that if somebody was going to pirate software, then they were never going to buy it in the first place and it’s greedy and mentally ill to think otherwise…
I’ve been on the piracy scene since 2001 and was a moderator for one of the largest dreamcast piracy forums once upon a time. The core members of that forum are still together on Discord and we all buy things wherever possible. Gabe Newell is correct in that piracy is a service problem.
Steam cut my games piracy down to zero for the longest time (501 games, 414 DLC) because it was more convenient and had frequent sales. Other companies that decided to pull away from Steam and conspire with publishers regarding timed exclusives on a platform that doesn’t want me as a customer (Epic). As a result, anything that is an Epic exclusive is pirated indiscriminately and seeded for several weeks. I don’t even play any of them. Download, seed for a week, delete, rinse and repeat on the next exclusive. The same goes for anything with Denuvo DRM.
GOG has DRM free games, there’s a site where they are all available for download, and I’ve discovered quite a few gems that way. Those gems got purchased on Steam because GOG also doesn’t want me as a customer, even though I had decent library and bought several games at launch on there. I’m refusing to use a third party launcher to install games from there because once again, its a service problem.
Netflix cut my video piracy to zero between 2011 and 2020. When I moved across the world, I brought only my clothes, laptop, and storage drives. Everything I wanted to watch was available on Netflix or YouTube. Once Netflix started losing shows like Futurama, Parks & Rec, and even Sons of Anarchy, I went straight back to piracy and haven’t looked back. Netflix only continued to get my money because my partner insisted on doing things legally. By the time she had enough in October 2023, we were paying for Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Ziggo, YouTube, Curiosity Stream, and HBO. At the moment, only Curiosity remains.
Adding up the 3 “services” we consume content from the most (not including the ones we watch one show here and there on) added up to €497 per year. My piracy costs €472 per year not including electricity, which is used anyway since the server also hosts a boat load of microservices like NextCloud which replaces yet another subscription storage. It’s costing me €72 to rent a seedbox, and €400 at the upper-end for a large NAS drive one time per year.
It’s a service problem and I don’t think those who refuse to contribute to the broken service problem are mentally ill. The “managers” in charge are.
Just FYI but you can download all your GoG games through the webpage as standalone installers, only thing you’re gonna be missing out on without the GoG galaxy software is the automatic updates/cloud saves (which have been broken anyway with the latest migration they’ve been up to for the last several weeks)
And here I am this morning sipping on coffee watching Tubi. I’ve been done paying more for less for a while now.
Don’t need to pirate. If this gradual enshittification has done anything to me, it’s been to make me lose any and all interest in keeping up with the latest shows. It’s turned my TV into mere background noise while I do other things.
Maybe Tubi and Pluto and Freevee will eventually go away. Maybe then I’ll just stop staring at a screen altogether.
I read a six hundred page physical paper book last weekend, cover to cover. I’d completely forgotten how pleasurable that is, and I can buy paperbacks by the pallet for next to nothing these days or attempt to borrow from the library before they become completely illegal.
I also remembered that it’s entirely ok to read a book that isn’t some centuries old work of ethereal literature. Run of the mill pulp fiction can be mighty entertaining even if you don’t get to brag that you read the unabridged version of Beowulf in the original language at your next craft cocktail party
tl;dr fuck these streaming companies
Same! Pluto TV, Tubi, and live tv on Plex are all ‘good enough’ replacements for me. They’re even quickly becoming my replacement for the hours of YouTube I used to watch a week. It may be a bit ironic but YT seems to plop commercials in the middle of someone speaking and then you’re stuck. At least with Pluto, you can flip over to another channel during a commercial. It’s just like actual broadcast television, but for free; which is kind of nice. I’m at the point with YouTube where I’m unable to watch more than a third of a video.
Today I learned that Plex exists, so thank you!
If you’re just starting out, skip Plex and go right to Jellyfin. It’s a bit less powerful and less polished, but FAR more reliable.
There’s this thing in Plex called the “Plex dance” (https://www.plexopedia.com/plex-media-server/general/plex-dance/) that you have to do every once in a while because something went wrong and you have to reset your library. But it also means you lose any customization you’ve done on your library, like setting specific covers (e.g. matching TV season posters) and you lose all your watched/unwatched data. I got sick of doing that and moved to Jellyfin. Haven’t had to do it since.
Isn’t Jellyfin something that I have to run through a computer, phone, or tablet? My living room TV is just a Walmart special with a Roku box. I’m too lazy to get more technical than that.
Edit: I stand corrected. I see it on Roku. I’ll see what it does. Thanks
I don’t know about that side of it, I just run it as a docker container and play it on my PC or cast it to my Chromecast from my phone to play on the TV.
So glad I canceled that bullshit a few months ago! Sailing the seas now, as FSM intended!
