Below is a look at the most exasperating news from streaming services from this week. The scale of this article demonstrates how fast and frequently disappointing streaming news arises. Coincidentally, as we wrote this article, another price hike was announced.
We’ll also examine each streaming platform’s financial status to get an idea of what these companies are thinking (spoiler: They’re thinking about money).
Netflix starts killing its cheapest ad-free plan in June
Sony bumps Crunchyroll prices weeks after shuttering Funimation
Peacock is raising prices
Fubo cuts 19 channels
In a seemingly desperate push, many streaming services prioritize revenue and profits ahead of building the best streaming service for customers.
We could go on about how this might force people to reconsider their subscriptions, but we should publish before another service makes yet another policy change.
I canceled my Hulu+Disney+whatever package this week, as well as my Netflix. Piracy all the way.
What do you use?
I’m not a cop btw
Pb + plex = win
Stremio & Real Debrid is soooo much easier than the self hosted approach, and is a piece of piss to set up
Honestly, it’s even solid without the Real Debrid addition (though I use Real-Debrid and think it’s great). Just add the Torrentio add-on and you’ll have tons of streams for just about everything.
Are we talking easier than Plex+ VPN and torrent? My buddy can access all his content anywhere he can login to Plex. It just means pre-downloading.
Genuinely curious if it’s worth giving up an already setup Plex server to look into this.
Streamio and RD are so easy that even my luddite wife can test all the linux distros she wants without my help.
suspicious
USENET, Sonarr and Radarr. It’s a godsend
NZBGet, Overseerr and Lidarr as well.
I haven’t done this myself because it’s obviously very illegal, but I’ve been told you set up a server with docker and set up the following containers:
- gluetun for VPN (exit in Switzerland with a fallback to Spain) as these countries have the laxest regulation re downloading licensed media.
- radarr for film
- sonarr for tv
- other *arr instances for subtitles, music, ebooks etc
- qbittorrent piped through the Gluetun container
- jellyfish, plex or XBMC in front as a player.
But what do I know? I haven’t done it myself and only download large Linux distributions because I love distro-hopping.
Do you hear anything about how those people pay for the VPN, or does that not come up?
Most people I speak to about this assume that the “good VPN” provider can be trusted not to keep logs.
You can also do all these in Windows. They have installers. Recommend Prowlarr for having all your torrent sites in one interface rather than setting them up repeatedly.
I’ve been told some use an app called LunaSea to to manage their arr instances. Apparently it brings all the arrs under one simple interface.
That sounds unnecessarily painful
I don’t really know what any of that means except for qbittorrent
Me neither as I haven’t done it.
But apparently it basically creates your own Netflix. You write a title you’d like to watch and within minutes you get a notification that it’s there, ready.
Personally I set up my own plex server, and have been recruiting family to switch from paid streaming services to me, plus I have a few friends and family with servers so between us we have plenty of coverage and fallbacks
Plex server on a purpose built Linux box with about 34tb. I mostly use Usenet for sourcing stuff, because it’s so quick and comparatively private, but I also use torrents for some harder to find stuff. I also buy a lot of the more obscure music I want from Bandcamp and just download the highest quality version.
I ran in parralel with my streaming services for a month, just in case I ever had trouble finding current shows we’re watching, but I’ve never had trouble finding good quality rips of shows the same day they are released.
I just can’t tell you how good it feels to look at my TV, movies, and music collection and know that it’s mine. Every episode and song and film is mine to store and protect, and not subject someone else’s license agreements.
FMHY
And this was exactly how they had it designed.
We all thought we were free from the burden of cable television.
But we should’ve known that while Netflix was doing it’s song and dance having been the cheapest subscription for years, everything was gearing up to be exactly like cable television.
I would enjoy PlutoTV and Tubi while you can, if I were you if you’re not already. You never know when they’ll start having to unroll tier systems or just drop out completely.
You’d think management at Netflix would look at the effect their changes have had on income, and uh, take that in to account planning future changes. Or something, right?
Apparently their income has increased so as far as they are concerned they are.
Amusingly my wife is ready to cancel because she got an add for one of their shitty mobile games instead of end credits while watching on her tablet in bed
My over-the-air tv antenna saves me $60/mo.
I’d love to do this, but I don’t get many channels where I live :(
I’ve really been thinking about that.
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what kind of lineup do you get?
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reception: clear? (And, only generally, tell me about your environment and population density? Eg ‘wooded rural, hilly, just me and bigfoot’)
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outages?
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is it easy to find what’s on? Is it accurate?
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commercials, right? Good ones?
Any responses - Rufus or anyone else - appreciated.
Signal quality all depends on where you live. An outdoor antenna will get the most channels (I get 44 channels). Most TVs now have a built in tv schedule app. Samsung TVs integrate ota program schedules into their free SamsungTV app.
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I just don’t watch anything. there is unlimited media floating around. if you need sitcom shows or house md or whatever the fuck… that is your own limitation. just do other shit. reddit and lemmy are bottomless pits, and youtube alone can be watched ad free and has a million lifetimes worth of media.
What a sad view
Honestly, there is cheap stuff out there to do besides watch screens so much. Draw, write, cook, carve, read, walk. It’s better for the mind all around. Absolutely, go pirate some shows. But taking a step back from the content stream hurts them too.
I’ve cancelled Netflix. Just wasn’t using it enough for the price. Instead I will entertain myself by downloading Linux distributions on BitTorrent.
I had to upgrade the 4x8TB drives in my Synology NAS box to 4x12TB to hold all of the extra Linux ISO’s I was downloading.
There are just so many distributions.
Got a recommendation for a Nas? My 12tb is getting so full of Linux distros, I have to expand faster than I thought
Synology’s smaller units are great and with a few docker configs you are ready to go.
I use Synology, works as smb, cifs, and nfs for my in garage proxmox stuff. It’s pretty good for the money
I have an older one… 411j I think. Amazon gifted it to me one day… so nice of them.
Awesome! But I hope you aren’t using the actual program “bitTorrent” cause that shit had a litany of privacy and security issues that I don’t even know where to start describing. A good one nowadays is qBitTorrent
cause that shit had a litany of privacy and security issues
You don’t solve that by using another program. You try to reduce the damage by using the torrent client in a dedicated virtual machine and reset the machine to the original image at regular intervals.
Yeah or you could, you know, just download a program that isn’t problematic.
I exclusively use qbittorrent to download Linux distros.
Don’t forget to upload some ISOs as well! Keep the network healthy and happy :)
What do you use for other downloads?
It’s qbittorrent all the way down.
You use qbittorrent to download qbittorrent? I think that causes a rip in the spacetime continuum.
It’s an impressive piece of software, alright
They let people believe that streaming is cheap, but it is not. A server can send streams to many people at the same time, but not so many as it seems and sever up time is a cost, in terms of energy and in terms of sysadmin time. Maintenance of the network is also expensive, especially in the US where most of the people live in low density neighbourhoods.
To that you have to add the cost of the big data servers that check everything people look at and profile their customers.
The dirty cheap subscriptions were meant to attract new customers, the service was heavily subsidized. The companies looked profitable just because other companies bought more ad space than necessary. Overadvertising is the preferred method to give stealth subsidies, but it is a cost for the other businesses of the network. After a while they have to shift those costs to the customers.
Those poor multi-billion dollar…
Nope, I cannot even finish typing that sentence.
Fuck 'em.
Yeah, that could be true. But seeing as how 99% of companies are following the same business model of squeezing more and more profit out of people, I’m gonna go with Occam’s razor on this one and say they’re most likely just trying to make more money because they can. As long as it keeps working, they’ll keep doing it.
To get an idea of the cost choose any cloud service and see how much you pay for the server usage by the hour. Try to llok at all the other costs involved in the business, production of dedicated content is not cheap. All the company staff, the administration and the billing have a cost.
Do not go by assumptions, measure, try to get an idea of the real costs.
I have access to 40€/month 10Gb symmetric (this is a commercial offer, so it’s obviously cheaper for them). Now tell me bandwith is so so expensive.
It was expensive back in the day, not so much any more, and prices plunge every year.
I’m sure the cloud cost that is advertised to me is there same as what would be provided to a multinational corp.
Netflix have been making a profit since 2003 and only recently introduced ads. They are just trying to squeeze more profit.
Netflix is a public company, you can just go look at how wrong you are about this.
They took in $9.3 billion in Q1 2024, and spent $702 million on “technology” and $3.7 billion on adding “content assets”
Their net profit was $2.3 billion, for one quarter. They could afford to just charge less money, but the line must go up.
When I worked at an internet provider, Netflix sent us a cache (I’m sure they have several now). I can’t imagine it cost them more than a few thousand dollars, as it was just a bare bones box full of hard drives. We gave them free power, internet, and rack space in our data center. Every night during the slow period it would fill up with whatever they thought would stream the next day.
There was nothing to do with neighborhoods, the cache served customers all over Maine and they didn’t pay us anything. Netflix’s costs are more likely content and licensing.
So, who wants to help a landlubber learn to sail the high seas?
Best place to start if you’re serious. https://trash-guides.info/
Frugal Usenet is a good cheap and reliable option for Usenet downloading or search out some torrent trackers of your preference. If you go the Usenet route, let me know, I can send you some indexer invites.
I’ve run most of the arr apps on windows but Linux with docker is less upkeep and easier to perform updates.
I am serious because fuck this streaming shit.
The setup can be a bit overwhelming but please message me if you get stuck on anything!
You’re sweet,thank you!
That’s the spirit! If you know your way around Linux admin, docker and such, don’t hesitate to dive into jellyseerr + *arr + Jellyfin, it was much simpler to set up than I expected. Once everything’s up and running, the experience is far superior to any commercial streaming service.
You’re speaking Greek but I’ll figure it out. I always do.
The trash-guides they posted are for a majority of the “arr” stack (Sonarr, Radarr, etc) that monitor stuff you ask for and automate a lot of the download handling.
Jellyfin is a FOSS media server alternative to Plex. They each have their minor pluses and minuses. Personally plex has been easier to get non-techie friends/family to use.
Docker is a containerization system. Basically instead of setting up a physical computer, or one or more virtual machines, you have a self contained bundle of everything a program needs to run that is linked to storage/network stuff on your actual system. Then they talk to each other.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is all immensely scalable. Especially if you don’t care about long term storage of a bunch of shows/movies. You can set it up on your personal PC and it’ll work fine. Set it up on a dedicated machineand it’ll be a bit more reliable. Moving stuff around is generally pretty painless. ( as long as the trash-guides or some similar standardization is followed )
I keep seeing Usenet mentioned for downloading media, but I’ve never tried it; I’ve stuck with torrents because they’re free and what I’m familiar with. Is paying for Usenet access worth it, is it more straightforward to use with the *arr stack, is there more content available?
IMO Usenet is worth the cost. It’s a different process than torrenting, with some extra steps, but once you wrap your head around it it’s fairly simple. Depending on the indexer you use, Usenet can be much better organized and easier to find what you’re looking for.
The nice part about Usenet is it’s basically full saturation of your internet line, so if you have a gigabit line, it will come as close as possible to running downloads at that speed. Frugal Usenet is $60 for their annual account, in my opinion it’s worth it just for speed alone. I pay for Usenet ninja as well as a secondary account for failed downloads.
I honestly think they offered good deals for a couple of years to lure the new generations into a false sense of security and make them forget how to pirate :D
They absolutely did. I used to pirate all my media 20 years ago, but then streaming became so convenient and relatively cheap that I just didn’t bother with it anymore.
Now, they’ve pretty much pushed me back out to sea with their ever increasing prices and decreasing content that’s worth watching. I’m not paying $15-20 per service, when they insist on fragmenting it to hell so I’d need 3-4 subscriptions to watch the things I want.
The joke is on them, piracy was motivated by the extreme convenience of streaming to make it as convenient as ever.
One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.
- Gabe Newell
https://www.gamesradar.com/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-not-price/
Still as relevant today as it was 13 years (dear god) ago. Sure, not every pirate would pay for media, just like not every pirate pays for games, but charging increasingly more money for a worse product is going to push people towards a solution that basically allows you to search for and watch anything you want, ad-free.
There’s people practically begging to spend money for certain shows and movies to be available, but they’re just not available on any streaming service. What else are they going to do?
Seven seas Renaissance
Where the fuck is this all heading? There isn’t any new medium to deliver media to people that will revolutionize content delivery. It’s already delivered directly to the device its viewed on. Back to $20 per individual movie like DVDs were before streaming took off? Except 10 more steps away from actual ownership of what you buy?
DVDs but they can also come to your house and snap the disc in half without offering a refund. Now that’s customer service!
Unironically, yes. Everything we had 20 years ago, but worse.
Worse for us. Better for the corporations.
It has lead me back to having a media tower and using Jellyfin to keep track of where I was.
Greeding corporations saw something was popular and profitable 10 years ago and are now doing everything they can to take a slice of the pie and get their fingers it. With more hands in the pan, there is less pie to go around, so they squeezing every last dollar they can out while lying to consumers about why. The income on these ventures is so laughably high and many production costs of the few original programming offered so low that they could cover everything on 5 dollars a month if not less. But if they did that they couldn’t give their executives million dollar bonuses, which is the only reason they are in the business.
I just started using the public library apps this week. Piracy has gotten too difficult for me recently.
Stremio and realdebrid just google those together and I promise you’ll be happy you did!
Thanks very much. Looks interesting.
…
Why does it feel like lately more and more articles fit Not The Onion or A Boring Distopia?
It’s the tech business model. Slowly building up a sustainable business has been replaced with coasting on investment money while attempting to capture an entire global market. Because these products can scale so easily. Now they’re entering the “oh shit we need to make money now” phase of the business model.
It’s not evil capitalists. It’s people acting rationally. The incentive structure leads to this behaviour. Eventually these services will consolidate into 2 or 3 major ones, like they do in every global tech market. Everyone will complain about it. But they’ll keep paying for it, because what other (legal) choice is there?
It’s not evil capitalists. It’s people acting rationally. The incentive structure leads to this behaviour.
IOW, don’t hate the player, hate the game.
We’ve been completely reduced to revenue streams for those that already have unimaginable wealth and it’s killing us. The transparent abuse and exploitation is so beyond parody it wraps around to sounding like a joke. Then you realize it isn’t a joke and get more depressed
Best part is how we went down the exact same path 100 years ago and learned absolutely nothing from it.
You will own nothing but make us happy by paying us more for less in your privileged lives of enshitified dependency. Please note that you‘ll all be punished anyway. Toodles!
Because it feels like the triggers are finally being fired from the corporate capitalists in the world. They’ve bided their time and when they feel things are tender enough to practice their most devious schemes, then they’ll fire upon it.
They do this whenever there is a generational shift, in culture and how we do things. They’re always carrying their ideas over and applying them in even more devious ways.
While we all like to laugh at, joke about and make memes of these things. It stops being a joke when you become personally inflicted by it.
Because we’re shoulders deep in late stage capitalism. It won’t be long before we start seeing consumer scarcity. People are living paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford much beyond basic needs. There are only so many hours in a day that people can work, so that’s not stretching much further. We’re rapidly approaching the breaking point. In a world with finite resources, a system seeking infinite growth will eventually collapse.
In a world with finite resources, a system seeking infinite growth will eventually collapse.
That’s why some of them are starting to look up. Our great-great-grandchildren are going to be indentured servants on an asteroid mine.
🏴☠️
Late-stage capitalism going full steam ahead.
Stop giving these clown your hard earned money… They don’t respect the paying customer.
