I’ve been too poor this whole time, so the hat is firmly attached.
I’ve been aware long enough of big gaps in the libraries of streaming services that there was never a reason to give it up.
It took until fucking March of this fucking year for Spotify to have any old De La Soul to stream. Good thing I’ve had a high quality rip of their early discography for fifteen fucking years. Otherwise I would have been shit outta luck on listening to them.
I couldn’t stream a killer album from fucking 1989 in 2022. There continue to be massive gaps in their libraries due to licensing issues and people who just don’t want to get underpaid by Spotify.
At least the De La Soul situation was understandable. Imagine the amount of time it must have taken to track down and relicense every sample.
I’ve been too cheap this whole time.
My man
Me too, but for some damn reason, it seems to cost more per month, overall, than a couple subscriptions.
But I will say, I love my setup…
Also you actually own the files not rent them, which I think is worth the price.
I’ve just finished my setup with Radarr, Sonarr, Jellyfin, qBittorrent and nzb360. I’ve paid 120€ for proton vpn for 2 years, 200€ for m2 ssd for 4tb and a few bucks for domain to access my setup from anywhere. Also, I have a 1gb internet connection for 65€ pm…
So, I’m willing to pay… I don’t want to spend all this time configuring scripts and integrations(though it was fun 😁)… But paying for Netflix, Prime, HBO, Disney+ and not being able to watch everything I want, simply makes me angry and miserable.
Duck them all. Arrrrr
It also requires you to skip from page to page. You need a page to search to tell you what page to to go search for what you want to watch
Are ya ready, kids?!?
I subscribe to a bunch of services but still pirate all the shows because it’s nicer to have them all in one place
Why do you subscribe then?
Probably for the convenience of partners/children.
Lots of people who aren’t super deep into computer nerdy shit get outright confused when faced with options they’ve never heard of like “Plex.” Sometimes it’s just more convenient to respect your partner and keep Netflix because it makes sense to them.
Plex doesn’t have easy-to-use parental control options and a lot of parents who might have the time to set up a Plex server for themselves may not have the time to muddle through the parental control options than just accepting that most streaming services have a kid-friendly section already set up and easy to access. Plex’s matching algorithm isn’t perfect, and opening it to your kids means you’ve got to make sure the matching is perfect. I’ve definitely had adult shows be recognized by the matching algorithm as children’s shows. If you don’t catch that, your kid can end up watching something you’d rather them not. It’s just a lot more work to manage your Plex parental controls than just using the off the shelf setup from the streaming services.
Neither of these apply to me, but I know folks who have Plex plus subscribed services for these reasons.
Plex actually has better parental controls than Netflix. You can even limit people to specific libraries so just put all the kid stuff in one and you’re good to go.
Really it’s that having everything in one place is more convenient.
I agree, but better /= easier to use for a lot of folks. For folks like us its a piece of piss, sure, but not everyone sadly.
Plus, like I pointed out, it means you have to be a lot more vigilant about making sure matches are correct. Plex makes mistakes.
Agreed. Sometimes I’ll get a text saying ‘the plex thing wont load’ and it doesn’t really make sense to them when I say ‘yeah, I took my computer today’
‘yeah, I took my computer today’
Kinda a dick move, eh?
I’m sorry I needed it for school?
I did warn anyone who had access that it wasn’t a 24/7 guarantee.
This is why you gotta pay your server admin.
Unacceptable!!!
They came free with a bunch of other things so I subscribe until they start charging me, and then they’re like “oh no don’t go here’s a free year” and I’m like “okay.” I’d steal it anyway but at least this way it’s a little ethical.
It’s an unpopular take here I would guess, but because they have the money to do it, and it’s the right thing to do.
The unfortunate thing is the actual actors/writers/producers aren’t getting paid because they’re paid per stream that Disney or whatever won’t count because it’s pirated.
if you’re talking about UI/UX check out stremio. it’s groundbrakingly good
Corporations had a good thing going on, they fucked it up.
Corporations had a good thing going on, they fucked it up.
Show me nearly any problem the US has and I will boil it down to Corporate Greed and/or Racism.
I have a ring set aside for the first woman I meet that says this
Sorry man, but you haven’t found her yet. 😁
You forgot complacency and apathy
Fair enough, but I think we’d be doing pretty good if we eliminated corporate greed and racism.
Complacency and apathy like to hang around with corporate greed and racism quite often, so i heard.
There might be a chance of eliminating four ghouls with one spell.
Honestly most of my problems in life have much to do with the fact that rich Southerners halted the Reconstruction in order to maintain dominance over the poor
So both!
Good Ol’ Andrew Johnson.
As we approach every service charging $30 a month, there’s going to be a point where the average consumer will just give up.
Meanwhile, your seedbox will still only be $5.
That’s cheap. Where do I sign up?
I pay $5 for evoseedbox.
Every time I see this meme there’s another platform on here
Because there’s a new platform (being annoying) every time this gets reposted, which is a lot!
Ah enshittification, making me not want to pay for your shitty services every god damn time.
It’s Plex’in time!
I’m more of a Jellyfin person though (all hail open source!)
Does jellyfin support transcoded downloads already? Thats the only thing holding me back from plex. All my movies and shows are 4k no need to load giant 4k files to a phone when traveling.
Yeah, it also has hardware acceleration for on the fly transcoding. It needs some configuration to tell it what you’re running it on but nothing particularly major
Plex is getting worse tough just saying…pushing their own services and now they started blocking certain hosting providers.
It may be but until other options are available on a PlayStation, I doubt I’ll move. I don’t even watch stuff but the people I serve to need functionally on the PS… maybe they’ll get smart TVs soon
Jellyfin is a great and superior alternative.
Don’t forget the price increase and drop in quality.
The price increase I can deal with. The drop in quality and getting rid of password sharing (after they actively endorsed it) is why they lost me.
Yeah, I used to turn to such activities because it was cheaper, now I do it because it’s simpler/easier.
Especially with Netflix increasing their prices again here in a couple months…
As someone who watches a lot of non-English stuff, I could never put the hat down.
Original comic was 2019. What’s the point of adding 2 years?
Who the fuck pays for more than one at a time anyway, I don’t mind fragmentation because I have no loyalty to one service and will move to one to watch it’s stuff, then move when i get bored of what it has to offer. Competition is always good. We shouldn’t have monopolies in any industry, including streaming
It’s only going to be a matter of time before they start requiring contracts, forcing you to stick with a service for long periods or face fees for dropping them.
They are capitalists, and so they must always profit more and more, never ending, for all of time. One of the things they will eventually do to hit that unsustainable proift motive is contracts. It’s what the cable companies did, and it’s only a matter of time.
This is exactly where it’s heading, not just for streaming but for anything and everything that can be packaged and sold “as a service” whether it’s actually a service or anything that’s undergoing the enshittification process of being converted from a product into a service.
Anything that can be converted into a service will be, and anything that can be so converted will, eventually, become a subscription, and from there, into a contract service model.
Honestly it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to even see literal standalone products converted into contract based subscriptions over time, given the IoT trend.
So beyond just your streaming service, your TV will have its proprietary OS converted to a subscription and then to a contract, so that you need to sign a 2 year deal with your TV manufacturer to keep it “powered”. Don’t sign a contract? They brick your TV.
With more and more smart appliances, expect to see companies try this to also force you into contracts to keep your fridge, toaster, smart lighting, microwave, door locks and cameras, etc. functional.
Naturally, baked into your contract will be language that forces you to share any and all data they can collect from said devices as a condition of the contract.
Food as a service
Water as a service
Get your pitchforks as a service ready
Pirating is just so much less hassle.
I disagree for the most part but if you already have a system for watching your pirated stuff sure, or if you just watch things at your computer desk.
Competition in a streaming service is an illusion that makes the overall service worse and more expensive. And it’s probably not viable long term. Why? Because there is no competition for any one show. If the platform were all streaming the same shows, that would be competition. Instead they simply share the service with each platform having its monopoly on the shows it streams.
You saying that shows don’t compete with each other?
They do not. You can watch and appreciate different shows. You may want to watch many of them. And watching one show will never replace watching another.
In other words, you’ve not seen farscape as long as you’ve not seen it, and the expanse or any other show ever will not change that fact. Hence no show is ever competing with it.
What they’re trying to do is to make a competition for your time and attention. But humans don’t work like that. Culture is a shared thing. Good shows will be shared and watched while bad ones will be forgeted. If you make more shows than people can watch and share, you’re simply wasting money. Which is why it’s not sustainable.
Competition for one show is another show. What else?
Ditto.
Canceling cable used to be, at the very least, a long, phone call that alternated between stretches of hold music dulling the senses and combative sales technique verbal jousting. Canceling a streaming service… I don’t think that has ever taken me more than four minutes of finding a webpage and clicking. The collective consciousness is in danger of forgetting/underplaying just how far we have come on this.
If pirating ever takes less than four minutes every other month, I guess it will have reached convenience parity. But it certainly wasn’t that back when I was in that game. And I really, really doubt it is now.
After you get it set up pirating is basically zero time. There’s some up front time costs learning how to automate everything but after that? Yar har
People are too lazy to manage when to subscribe where based on what’s on offer at any given time.
That’s it, that’s all there is to it.
But pirating is just better, I can see what’s new across all services in seconds and get whatever I want at basically streaming speed with xdcc
Most people don’t know where to look for to get started on that. Some people don’t even know that pirating that show they watch is even an option in the first place.
No, but as a current non-pirate, seeing the UX of some of the newer tools is mindblowing. “You mean, I just type in any show, it looks it up and to find episode info, then gets me the episodes so I can watch it, without me having to split between services or even THINK?”
The legal show world should have that, but every one of those services are locked-down so you can’t have a solution like that in front of them. Heaven forbid we could just license shows like retail locations license radio.
I mean, I suck-it-up and sub to all of them. I hate the experience and my wife bitches at me at least weekly because it’s so much work to find and start a show (to the extent she ends up NOT watching the show she wanted, and leaves some stupid channel on at random). We are so close to cancelling all of them, not for the money but because the experience is complete ass.
Guess what I’ll be doing to watch my TV if we do that?
